


The Aftershocks Remain

by treenaivycarter



Category: Glee
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anger, Character Study, Depression, Developing Friendships, Episode: s03e05 The First Time, Gen, Kurt Hummel-Centric, M/M, Marijuana, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Sexual Assault, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Realistic, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-11-14 14:13:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11209728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treenaivycarter/pseuds/treenaivycarter
Summary: Will Schuester receives a call the morning after Blaine left Kurt at Scandals. Something horrible has happened, and Kurt has no where else to turn.Follow Kurt's recovery from what happened to something next to normal. These are the aftershocks of Kurt's experience, reverberating from himself to his friends, family and community, in the aftermath of his attack.





	1. Call to Arms

**Author's Note:**

> I keep as much as I can non-graphic and I try and keep the characters as in character as I can (though I am biased for and/or against certain characters). I do use some meta-character-studies that accept all the plot holes and character inconsistencies as officially canon and making sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer Note: The song quoted at the beginning is “Aftershocks” from Next to Normal, and the title is also from this song. The song quoted at the end is “Can’t Get it Out of My Head,” by ELO. It's Glee; there needs to be some reference to music.

 

 _“The headaches and the nausea will pass and you'll endure_  
_You son is gone forever though, of that the doctor's sure_  
_The memories will wane, the aftershocks remain….”_  
–Gabe, “Aftershocks,” _Next to Normal_

 

The incessant ringing woke Will up. He groaned and turned over, trying to hold onto the remnants of a vaguely interesting dream while he wondered why he set his alarm so early. He moved sleepily across his bedroom to shut it off, stumbling over his pants crumpled on the floor. He grabbed his phone and immediately woke up, staring at the glowing screen.

It wasn’t his alarm. It was an incoming call from an unknown number. It was 4:28 in the morning. Who calls that early?

Was it his mother? Was she dead? Emma?

He answered it as quickly as possible in the middle of the last ring, “Hello?”

“Mr. Schue,” Kurt Hummel, of all people, slurred. For half a second, his sleep-addled brain wondered (panicked) how _Kurt Hummel_ —notorious in Will’s eyes for his stalker tendencies and vaguely predatory behavior, the one flamboyantly homosexual kid who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or his head down, the one who demanded controversial solos and didn’t deserve them—had got his number. _Was Kurt stalking him? Wasn’t Kurt in a relationship with Blaine now? How do I let him down gently without risking the club—_

“Mr. Schue,” Kurt Hummel slurred again, “I need help.”

Then he remembered, with hint of guilt about his immediate response to Kurt. He had given all of the original Glee kids his cell number to call in case they were drunk and could not safely get home. Ever since he gave his Glee kids his number, not one had called. He had been so proud of them for keeping sober—that didn’t matter now. ( _But it_ would _be Kurt to break first wouldn’t it_? he couldn’t help but think, _He came to school drunk a few times_ ).

“Where are you?” Will said, hobbling over to his jeans and trying to slip into them as Kurt whimpered and answered.

“I don’t know where I am.”

It felt like a slushie was dumped down his back. Instead of being terrified of Kurt, Will suddenly felt terrified for Kurt.

“What happened?” Will said as he pulled on his shoes, “What do you last remember?”

“Blaine wanted us to go to a bar—”

“What bar?” Will cut him off, latching onto that.

“Scandals,” Kurt whispered. Then he sniffled. _Oh no, now he’s going to cry_ , Will realized.

“Where is that?” Will tried to ask as he fumbled with the GPS in his car.

Kurt must have misheard him because he instead said in heavy, half-choked breaths, “It’s a gay bar.”

“ _Where_ —”

“I didn’t drink, Mr. Schue,” Kurt said through his tears, “I didn’t drink any alcohol. I don’t know how—I don’t know how this happened.”

With dawning horror, Will realized what must have happened.

Kurt Hummel, a flaming, very innocent, very young boy wanders into a gay bar for the first time. He was never taught to keep an eye on his drinks, to not take drinks from any one, to look for the signs of shady characters. Terri had only ever been drugged once at a college party, with Will finding her before the person who drugged her, and she had gone limp and woke up severely nauseous, severely hung-over (more so than what she drank had warranted), and without the memory of how Will had gotten her home.

“Do you remember anything about the bar?” Will said instead, not telling Kurt anything he suspected of happening to him. Meanwhile, he Googled the address of Scandals on his phone while they talked (the wonders of smart phones).

“I—yeah. Sebastian—”

“Who is Sebastian?” Will asked, as he entered the address into his GPS.

“Sebastian Smythe. He’s the new lead vocalist of the Warblers—”

“The Dalton Warblers?” Will asked, as he backed out of his driveway.

“Yeah, Blaine and I were at the Lima Bean and Sebastian came over and flirted with Blaine so hard and insulted me and then he badgered us into _going to that bar_ ,” the last part of Kurt’s jumbled, fast statement was dripping in rage and slow like each syllable was drenched in syrup.

“Tell me about Sebastian. Was he at the bar?”

“Yeah, he got us fake IDs and bought Blaine some sort of alcohol and gave me a Shirley Temple.” Will didn’t move as Kurt said this angrily, though his arms tensed and his knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Then Blaine got really wasted and started _dancing_ with _Sebastian_.”

Then Will thought of another horrible question. Where is Blaine Anderson in all this? Where is Blaine _now_?

“What happened while Blaine danced with Sebastian?”

“I went to talk to Da—someone at the bar.”

That was a name, Will realized. Whoever this Da-someone was, Kurt was protecting. An illicit lover, maybe? Did he… Was he the one who…?

“Kurt, do you remember leaving the bar?”

“Yeah, I was, I was going to drive Blaine home because he was drunk off his mind,” Kurt started crying harder.

“Do you remember getting to the car?”

“Yeah,” Kurt choked out, “Blaine wanted to have sex. I said no.” _Oh no,_ Will thought in horror. “He insisted and pulled me into the car, I said no, screamed at him, and he walked off. He wouldn’t let me drive him home.”

“And then what happened?” Will tried to say as soothingly as possible, “Did you go back in the bar?”

“I,” Kurt paused. Then he said in such a little voice, in such a heartbroken voice that Will wanted to cry with him, “I don’t know.”

“Do you see anything around you?” Will said as he pulled into the bar’s parking lot. Lo and behold there was Kurt’s car, “Like, are you outside or inside?”

“I’m inside, somewhere.”

“In what kind of room?”

“Bathroom.”

“Did you wake up there?”

Kurt didn’t answer.

“Did you wake up in the bathroom?”

“No,” Kurt whispered.

“Where did you wake-up?”

“In a bed.”

Will never wanted to be right about what happened to Kurt.

“What kind of bed?”

Kurt didn’t answer.

Will pressed on, “Was it a motel room or are you in someone’s house?”

Kurt didn’t answer.

“Kurt, stay with me, can you go look out the window or get outside?”

Kurt whispered, “Do you—do you think I was raped?”

Will didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say _no_ , because Kurt woke up in a bed in a place he didn’t recognize. He couldn’t say _yes_ over the phone to this kid. He finally said, “I don’t know.”

“I woke up alone,” Kurt said, breathing heavily, “in a bed in some seedy motel without remembering what happened after Blaine _left me_. I think I was—I think I was—” Kurt began to hyperventilate.

“Do you see anything that can tell you where you are right now, Kurt? Something to say what motel you’re at?”

Kurt was still hyperventilating.

“Kurt, _stop breathing_.”

“Wha—”

“You’re hyperventilating. One way to stop that is to stop breathing at all.”

Kurt complied. After twenty seconds, Kurt took a deep breath and finally said, “Hott Chix motel, with two T’s in the Hott, and an X in Chix.”

“You’re doing so good,” Will said, as he Googled the address and input it into his GPS, “You’re doing just fine.”

It was only two minutes away from Scandals, behind a bunch of trees and after two turns.

“Can you come outside, Kurt? Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, voice suddenly monotone, as if all his pain and fear had drained away in Will’s short drive from Scandals to Hott Chix, “I’m hanging up now.”

_Click._

It was a dive, Will realized as he parked and stepped out. Hott Chix was a real shady-looking two story building with white-washed walls, a cracked, once-mint-green roof, and maybe eight rooms on each floor. One of the windows was boarded up and another was cracked. The paint on half the doors was peeling. The motel’s name was painted in red on the side along with a crude peach blob with extremely defined naked breasts and a yellow blob on top that was probably supposed to be hair. That was what Will surmised was a “hot chick” in this seedy motel. Will wondered briefly if the dive offered hourly rates.

Will waited, leaning on his car, until the fourth door from the left on the bottom floor cracked open.

 _My God,_ Will thought immediately, seeing Kurt step outside, _he’s a mess._ Will had never seen Kurt less put together, even when he’d been slushied. Kurt’s hair, usually styled up above his forehead almost like a pompadour, was going in all directions, almost knotted-looking in parts, and not quite straight; it was almost curled in some places as if someone had grabbed his straight, gelled hair. The way parts of his hair hung in his face made him look years younger—more like what Sue had cruelly called an eleven-year-old milkmaid than the eighteen-year-old he actually was. His grey shirt—that Kurt probably knew the actual color name for—was wrinkled, untucked and looked almost buttoned up all the way except some buttons just weren’t there anymore. His face was splotchy, probably from the tears.

Kurt got over to him as quickly as he could. His steps were slow but firm, as if he was strictly controlling his gait. Will got up to meet him halfway and Kurt didn’t hesitate to lean into him like he was in pain. Against him, Will realized all of a sudden that he was actually taller than Kurt. Kurt was always so larger-than-life, so confident, so strong he had never really understood Kurt wasn’t that big at all.

“C’mon, kid, you’re gonna be okay,” Will said, not sure if he was lying or not.

Kurt whispered, “My vest and my bolo tie are gone.” He paused and continued after a moment of hesitation, “And my underwear.”

Will didn’t know what to say. He opened the door with one hand and lowered Kurt into it. Kurt gingerly brought his legs into the car one by one, almost like Artie did but without using his hands to carry them.

 _Do your legs hurt?_ Will almost asked, ever the idiot he immediately thought after he guessed where Kurt’s pain was almost certainly emanating from. Will hurried to the other side of the car and got in. He put his key back in the ignition and backed out of the parking place.

“Are you,” Kurt said after almost a minute of silence, “Are you going to make me go to the hospital or the police station or something?”

Will hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He probably should take Kurt somewhere.

Kurt continued, with his voice strangely calm after the tears and the panic attack, “I mean, I probably should go but teachers aren’t really supposed to be driving students anywhere.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Will says, “You were raped and—”

“And I called you instead of my father or my step-brother or my boyfriend or any of my friends,” Kurt said quietly, “And they’re going to ask why I called you instead of any of them.”

Will hadn’t thought about that. In fact, that warranted: “Why _did_ you call me instead of any of them?”

Kurt shook his head, ran a hand through his hair and pulled on it, “Finn is so—he’d freak out or something. My dad is out campaigning night and day and he’d get so mad I went somewhere to a bar with Blaine and got myself raped. His heart is still so messed up and his campaign would suffer. And Blaine left me at the bar and I don’t even know if he made it home. You were my only option.”

“You didn’t _get_ yourself raped,” Will said firmly, latching onto that comment, ever the Spanish teacher in that moment, “You _were_ raped. Notice the passive voice. If you _got_ yourself raped, it’d be you raped yourself. That’s not what happened.”

“I don’t even know what happened,” Kurt said in a small, high voice, the voice of a child.

Out of the corner of Will’s eye, he saw Kurt’s hands dig into the knees of his black trousers. They sat in silence for another few seconds. Kurt’s hands raised and he went to dig the dirt out from under his fingernails—

“Don’t do that.”

Kurt paused mid-motion, “Do what?”

“That nail thing.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“There could be evidence there,” Will said, trying to remember all he could from _Law & Order: SVU_ marathons with Terri, and trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about, “Skin from your attacker or hair.”

“ _What_?” Kurt said, scandalized, “There won’t—”

“Just trust me, okay?”

Kurt fell quiet then and Will didn’t dare look at him.

“Where are we going?” Kurt said at the stoplight.

“The hospital.”

“Why?”

“There could be,” Will paused, unsure if he needed to be delicate, but pushed on, “tearing. And,” he paused again, turning to look at Kurt. To his surprise, Kurt had turned fully to look at him head-on, “And you need to be tested for STDs.”

“ _What?_ ” Kurt exclaimed shrilly.

“Kurt, you _need_ to be tested for STDs,” Will repeated, “Like HIV and syphilis.”

“You’re saying,” Kurt said breathlessly, eyes wide, pupils blown, “You’re saying he could have given me _AIDS_?”

Will didn’t know what else to say other than, “It’s a possibility, Kurt, and that’s why I need to take you to the hospital right now.”

“Oh my god,” Kurt said, voice quickening and going higher and higher, “Oh my god, ohmygod, omigod, omigodomigod—”

“Kurt.”

“No, no, no, no...”

“Kurt, you need to calm down.”

And then Kurt was crying again.

“Kurt!” Will said as firmly as he could manage, “Just breathe. In and out. In and out. …. Very good.”

“I don’t want to die,” he eventually whispered, wiping his face with the back of his hand, “I don’t want to die because of this.”

Will didn’t dare ask what _this_ was—being raped, being at a bar, being gay—and just kept driving.

“Do you want me to call your dad?”

“No,” Kurt almost whimpered, “But I guess you have to, right? You or the hospital will.”

“You’re eighteen, aren’t you?”

Kurt nodded.

“Then the hospital really doesn’t have to. Do you have your insurance card on you?”

Kurt shook his head, “I got my driver’s license and my fake ID.”

Will didn’t know what that might mean for Kurt. Could they turn them away if they couldn’t pay? Maybe Will had enough to cover it until Kurt could pay him back? He shook his head and kept driving.

* * *

They arrived at the hospital after around thirty minutes with Kurt reading off of Will’s Maps app. Will circled the parking lot, not really sure where to take Kurt. This didn’t seem like an emergency, but he guessed they should go to the ER. He didn’t want to ask Kurt to Google it. He didn’t want Kurt to break down or see him as incompetent. 

“You have to pay to park here,” Kurt told him wearily, as Will eventually pulled into a parking spot.

“Really?” he asked, bemused.

“Yep,” Kurt said, eyes on his lap, “Had to pay to park my car here last year when my dad was in his coma.”

Will frowned.  “No one drove you here?”

“Well, Miss. Pillsbury the first day, but after that it was just me.”

“No one was…?” He wasn’t sure how to complete that. Kurt seemed so old to be taken care of by other people, seemed maybe a bit too mature. But then Kurt gently dragged his limp bangs across his forehead, trying to keep it above his brows, just like when he auditioned so long ago. “…checking on you?”

He pursed his lips, and shook his head. “It was just me. My dad told me I had to get used to being alone and…. Well, I was alone. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, you gotta pay to park in a hospital parking lot.”

“That seems wrong.”

“The American healthcare system, everyone,” Kurt said, putting on an air of showmanship and flapping a hand in a general direction as if presenting. After a moment: “Nurses and doctors have to pay to park, too. Nurse Nancy in the ICU told me, when I threatened the nurse at the front desk over it.”

Will couldn’t really imagine Kurt threatening anyone, but he could imagine him being condescending and cruel until they gave in to his princely demands.

Will got out of the car. After a moment, Kurt followed him. Kurt slammed the door and then stood a second, just staring at the door. Was there a scratch or something? A dent he hadn’t noticed? Will moved himself around the old metal—his car was older than Kurt, he realized, surprised—until he was sidled up next to the teenager. He joined Kurt in looking at their reflections in the dusty tinted glass. Kurt’s frown wobbled a bit in the car window and Will turned to see his eyes had welled up. Kurt didn’t seem to care how worried Will looked. He gingerly raised a hand to where his shirt was missing its buttons and then up to his collar. He rubbed at the fabric just under his adam’s apple. He whimpered a little and Will recalled how Kurt had remarked that his bolo tie, whatever that was, was gone. Kurt wrapped his arms around himself, not really crossing them defensively, but more like hugging himself. Will laid his hand on Kurt’s shoulder, and Kurt spun into him, burying his head in Will’s shoulder.

Will moved towards the entrance of the ER with Kurt leaning heavily against him again.

The ER was not empty, even at this early hour. There was a couple of couples, with the women heavily pregnant and breathing hard—Will’s heart panged a little, missing the child he never had with Terri, Quinn’s daughter who might’ve been his daughter in another life—and a man in a jumpsuit clutching a bloody cloth around his fist, and young man bouncing a screaming baby, and another bowed over, clutching his stomach, moaning in pain, and a couple of old women, and a man sweating visibly, even across the room. Kurt looked at them all, pale and face twisted in dismay. The pair of them headed to the nurse at the desk, behind a thick layer of glass. Will wondered idly why she would be behind glass at all. This wasn’t New York, or even Columbus or Cleveland. Who would try and attack her, and, if not for protection, why else would it be there?

He started, “My student, Kurt—”

“I was raped,” Kurt said, eyes on the floor, before raising them up to pin the female nurse behind the glass. Will noticed she was a little shocked, most likely by Kurt’s voice. It was always startling to hear it the first time, especially now that he wasn’t as chubby cheeked and short as he used to be. “I don’t know what you do for that. Do you do rape kits for men?”

She pursed her lips and nodded. Will wondered if her nod was a bit too slow, if it was hesitant, if she doubted Kurt because Kurt was obviously gay.

“There may be a bit of a wait,” she warned him, “There was a fire this morning and it’s creating a bit of a backlog. Have you thought about going directly to the police?”

Kurt frowned and looked at Will.

“He was raped last night,” Will clarified, firmly. “And there’s no school today. And the police will just bring him back here.” He didn’t know how true that was. He couldn’t remember from _SVU_ and he didn’t dare look it up in front of Kurt and this nurse.

“Do you believe you were drugged?” she asked, flicking her eyes between Will and Kurt.

“Yes.”

“Were you drinking or using drugs?” She asked. At Kurt’s pause, she added, “You will not be charged if you were, if you are honest on the report.”

“I don’t _remember_ drinking.”

Will turned around to stare at Kurt. Kurt had said on the phone that he didn’t drink, but now he might have been drinking? Kurt pointedly didn’t look at him.

“I’ll need your insurance,” She said, looking at Will, “Is your son on your plan?”

“He’s not my dad.” “He’s not my son.” They said at once. They looked at each and then back at the nurse. She frowned and looked at them disapprovingly. Will frowned in return, wanting to say something about her judgement but he restrained himself.

Kurt said, “I don’t have my insurance card with me. Is that a problem?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to head home and get it?” she said, pressing Kurt, “There is a long wait.”

Will’s mouth opened, surprised she’d dare ask them to leave even if only briefly. Kurt frowned hard, looked up at Will again, and then at his shoes and his shirt with its missing buttons. He brushed his bangs across his brows again. _Was it a nervous habit this whole time?_ Will wondered, _was he actually nervous auditioning so long ago in full falsetto?_

“If I leave,” he said quietly, “I won’t be able to come back. And if I don’t come back, I’ll just pretend to be okay, and I won’t be okay. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

“We’ll bill you directly, and you can call with your insurance tomorrow.” The nurse didn’t say anything more, just handing him some forms on a clipboard. Kurt grabbed it and her ball point pen. He dodged Will’s hand reaching for his shoulder again, and sat with a huff into one of the blue plastic chairs, welded together below the seats. Will sat down next to him and peered at the forms he filled out. He was surprised they were just normal doctor’s office forms, asking for: name, number, address, workplace—“Do I put ‘student’? Smart alec? Future Broadway star? Unpaid mechanic?”—and the name and phone number of person to contact in the event of an emergency—“We’re in an emergency room. I think it’s a bit late to call anyone.”— insurance info, and why he was there. Then there was a HIPAA form. Then there was some sort of questionnaire that Kurt paused at and Will squinted at. The first section questions seemed normal—heart problems? Migraines? Hearing problems? Diabetes? Allergies? Current medicines?—but then they asked about mental health, like a list of symptoms that Will vaguely recalled from his Intro Psych class in college. Kurt paused, looking at Will from out of the corner of his eye.

“What is it?” Will asked, “Do you have a question?”

“Do you have to call my dad if something freaks you out?”

“Something freaks me out?”

“We both know you’re like a paper doll in a rainstorm and see about as much as their little cardboard eyes do, Mr. Schue, but I need to know what you’re obligated to do if I’m answering these questions.”

“What I’m obligated to do?” he asked slowly, trying and failing to not be offended by Kurt’s blithe assessment of his behavior.

“Like mandated reporting. What do you have to report?”

McKinley’s policies were never really clear to Will, or enforced by really anyone, or followed by any of the other teachers. “Child abuse and neglect,” he said finally, fairly sure of that.

“That’s it?” Kurt confirmed, half-accusing, half-relieved.

“I—yes.”

“Alright,” Kurt said, checking several of the mental health boxes.

Will startled at the checked boxes. He brought his voice down to a hissing whisper, “You’re suicidal?!”

“I have been in the past,” Kurt said firmly.

“You’re checking the box _now_ though!” He hissed back, then froze. “Wait. When…?”

“Before Glee, mostly.”

Ringing in Will’s ears were Burt Hummel’s words a few weeks ago: _“Your Glee club saved my kid’s life. It turns out art can do that, ya know.”_ He didn’t know Burt was…. He didn’t know it was serious, it was real, it wasn’t exaggeration. “Mostly?” he asked.

Kurt shifted uncomfortably. “Last year, too. Before I transferred, before the Wonderful Hudmel Wedding. The Burnt Grilled Cheesus, when my dad was in the coma. Duets Week, with the Return of Latent Homophobia. Theatricality Week and the Faggy Lamp, when Finn and Carole moved in and moved out. My Mellencamp Period. The ‘Defying Gravity’ Diva-off.”

Will didn’t know what to say, so as always he fumbled, “The Diva-off, you know that —”

“I threw the note on purpose you know,” Kurt confessed, interrupting him. Then he turned his full glare on Will, “You really _should_ know. Have you ever actually listened to our warm-up scales? That high-F isn’t even my highest note, and I thought you of all people would have noticed, or you know, called me on my bulltwit, or noticed at least in _Le Jazz Hot_ maybe where the glissando ended on an F _sharp_ , half a step above that stupid note, or happened to notice the very end of my range is a _B_ _flat_ —and I’ll let you in on a little secret, it’s not the B flat I can belt!”

“I don’t—Really?!” Will asked, gobsmacked.

“Are you really that surprised?” Kurt said, scoffing, “You heard the high-F in ‘Le Jazz Hot.’ All of you did. My voice got deeper, too, and how often can a boy with a dropping voice expand his range _upwards_? Why on earth would I start a fight with Rachel of all people if I had even the slightest doubt about winning? Trust me, Mr. Schue, I lose at life enough to know when to pick my battles. As Sun Tzu said, ‘Victorious warriors win _first_ and _then_ go to war.’”

Will didn’t know where to start with that response, but: “You’ve read the _Art of War_?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Kurt said, dropping the clipboard on the ground with a loud clap against the linoleum and crossing his arms as he lounged against the chair, “I read it before Glee even started. This has been established.”

“But why did you blow the note if you knew you could hit it? If you knew I’d give you a solo for it, at that?” Will asked, honestly confused and a little defensive.

“For one, _no_ you would not have given me that solo because we all know Miss Rachel Berry would blow up like Vesuvius if you dared to give a solo to one of her main competitors. Case in point: the Tina Cohen-Chang Song Solo Switcharoo.”

“Do you really name every Glee club drama?”

“ _Secondly_ , my dad got a call at work telling him that his son was a fag—though why didn’t expect that to happen still eludes me to this day—and—”

“He asked you to pull out of the competition?” Will guessed, half-offended on Kurt’s behalf, half-offended on his own behalf and history with Burt.

“ _No_ ,” Kurt protested, “I decided to pull out on my own. My dad wasn’t used to the abuse I live with every day and have lived with since even before I knew I was gay. He needed to be kept safe, so I…. You’ve met my dad. You can’t tell me when he came in to bully you my sophomore you didn’t think he was there because he found out I was doing something as _gay_ as singing and dancing and was trying to pull me out of the club altogether. He’s a blue collar, tight-lipped, midwestern man and I’m _me_. He should have had a boy like Finn for a son but I… I know there are things more important than being a star. You know that, too, Mr. Definitely-Not-An-Accountant. _Rachel_ on the other hand….”

Kurt grabbed the clipboard and brought it back to the nurse, before Will could say more than his name. Kurt returned to his side quickly enough, and Will didn’t have much to say.

They sat for about fifteen minutes of terse silence with Kurt fiddling with his phone and Will staring at the other people in the waiting room. Kurt sat primly, with his legs crossed femininely, one knee directly over the other, back straight, head bowed only slightly over his touchscreen.

“You can hit a _B5_?” Will said, in wonder, counting up the notes. It was the second B above middle C.

Kurt flicked his eyes up at him. “Yeah,” he said softly, “Well. Probably. I can hit a B flat but that’s not really a B is it? If I could get a real vocal coach,” Will tried and failed to not look hurt, as Kurt continued, ignoring him, “who didn’t seem to think my voice would drop at some point I probably _could_ expand upwards, but you and I both know that’s because I’m perfect.”

Will smiled half-heartedly.

“I wish we’d done _Next to Normal_ instead of _West Side Story_ this year,” Kurt said quietly, “But it doesn’t really have a big enough cast to give enough people roles to be put on.”

“What’s _Next to Normal_?”

“Well for one it’s from this decade so obviously you’ve never heard of it, but it’s a musical from off-Broadway that got big enough to move to Broadway. It’s about this woman Diana who’s bipolar and her family.”

“Why do you want it?” Will asked, wondering briefly if Kurt was maybe bipolar. To be fair, Will didn’t know much about bipolar in general, and every time he spoke to Kurt he realized he didn’t know much in general.

“Gabe, her dead son who she hallucinates, sings perfectly in my range,” Kurt said, shrugging, “The first time I heard ‘I’m Alive’ I honestly thought it was a female singer, and when I found out it was a man with essentially my range—he’s really a low tenor, but he sings like a high tenor in this musical—I fell completely in love. And Finn or Artie or Puck could play her psychiatrist, and Finn or B-Blaine,” he paused on Blaine’s name but hurried on as if he didn’t, “could play her husband. Mercedes or Rachel could play Diana. Tina or Santana could play Natalie, her daughter.” Kurt frowned then, rubbing a hand over his lower thigh, near his knee, “I guess Blaine could play Gabe, too.”

“What’s wrong?”

Kurt shrugged and said blithely, “Blaine could play Gabe better than me.”

“I haven’t seen it or anything, but I’m sure you could play him well,” Will said, feeling rather awkward. He knew he was humoring Kurt’s attempts to distract them both from why they were here in this ER, but these conversations seemed almost as bad as the Sword of Damocles hanging over them. Deeper-seated issues. He’d heard Kurt had tried out for Tony, but Blaine had gotten the part. And given the turn out, Blaine _had_ played Tony wonderfully. And Will had thought it was obvious that Blaine would get the part, or Finn, or Puck. Kurt was rather…not what anyone expected of Tony, wasn’t he?

Some more time passed, and Will thought for a bit. He hadn’t seen Kurt’s audition, or Blaine’s for that matter, but he had heard Kurt had done some fantastic gymnastics and something with short swords he’d called sai (how’d he even get those into school?) and that Blaine had sung a Tony song when auditioning for Bernardo. Will knew well that one should _never_ audition for a musical with a song _from_ the musical and that Kurt’s display of knife knowledge and athletics were consistent with Tony’s character. Kurt’s voice probably could do Tony’s light tenor justice his voice high naturally and made for Broadway and the Beatles, but Blaine could do him justice too if with less vibrato, complexity and depth. Visually speaking, male Broadway singers tended to have more feminine figures, lithe and thin and small, which both Kurt and Blaine have in spades, right up until their facial structures and their voices. Maybe Kurt should have been at least the understudy. Now knowing what he knew about Kurt’s voice, he felt somewhat guilty that Kurt hadn’t even gotten a singing part. Then again, he had refused to play Frank in Rocky Horror and maybe he was just feeling this way because of this horrible situation that had landed them in the ER.

After another long wait, Kurt whispered, “What if I wasn’t drugged?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I just got wasted and just don’t remember it?”

Will frowned and said, “If you were drunk enough to completely black out, you were too drunk to have sex and someone r-took advantage of you regardless. Whatever happened, it was illegal.”

Kurt shifted, hunching a bit. He whispered, “What is Blaine gonna say?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he—left me, and then I wake up in a motel bed after some man… what if he thought I cheated?” Kurt asked worriedly, voice rushing fast and up an octave, “I’m not a cheater. Everyone was so quick to say I was cheating on Blaine with Sam, but what if Blaine thinks this means I cheated, but I didn’t want to?”

“He won’t think that.”

“I was…,” Kurt stopped and shook his head, shifting his crossed knees, “He was so mad. What if he wants to break up with me?”

Will didn’t know what to say to that.

“If he breaks up with me…,” Kurt trailed off. He curled over, uncrossing his legs, and rested his head in his hands.

Will thought about Kurt’s checked box about the suicidal thoughts and thought about sharing how he almost attempted suicide in high school, but for some reason he didn’t.

More time passed. One of the pregnant couples had been taken back and the man with the screaming baby and a few more rushed in on gurneys. Will checked his watch and his quickly dying phone. They’d been waiting more than two hours. It was almost 8:30 that Saturday morning.

Suddenly a loud grumble erupted from Kurt and Will turned to see him scrunch down in his chair, face completely red.

“Do you want me to go get you some food?” Will asked, amused and kind of hopeful because he was rather hungry himself, “Something to drink maybe?” He didn’t want to leave Kurt all alone just because he was hungry.

“I’m not allowed to eat or drink anything,” Kurt said, face longing and sad, “But you should probably get something for yourself.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Will went to the vending machine in the hall. He looked around at the empty white halls. Like all hospitals, the hallway was very wide to allow for two gurneys to move on each side, but it made the whole room seem so big. He could see Kurt through the hall window, still hunched a bit himself. He pulled out his phone, looking both ways for a nurse waiting to scold him like some sort of child, and texted Emma, “At hospital w/ Kurt. Postpone date?” but before he hit send, he bit his lip, tapping his toe against the cool, white linoleum. Kurt didn’t want anyone to know, or else he would have called his family or one of his friends. Will wondered briefly what that meant about how Kurt thought of him—either someone so trustworthy with his secrets, someone reliable, or more likely that Kurt didn’t care about Will’s opinion of him, unlike everyone else in his life. Kurt didn’t give a damn about what his enemies thought of him. He backspaced the whole message, took his gas-station-style-honeybun and water bottle, and returned to Kurt’s side just in time to see a male nurse in blue scrubs gesture for Kurt to follow him.

Will sidled up next to them and said, “Are they ready to see you?”

Kurt shrugged and the nurse looked at him suspiciously, asking, “Are you family?”

Kurt looked the nurse dead in the eye and said without hesitation, “Yes.”

Will felt almost flattered, and tried to hide his confusion from the suspicious nurse. They were led to an equally white examination room with a blue examination table covered with translucent paper.

Will swallowed and asked Kurt, as gently as he could manage, “Are you, um, comfortable with—?”

“Yes,” Kurt interrupted. Will wasn’t sure whether Kurt was comfortable with Will coming with him to the examination room or the fact that the examining nurse was a man.

Will pursed his lips and turned to the nurse. “Are you the, uh, the nurse that will be doing the, uh, kit?”

“Mr. Schue!” Kurt hissed under his breath.

The nurse looked at Will, seeming to avoid Kurt pointedly, and said briskly, “Usually the female SANE nurse will be with you. I just do the intake in these cases. Unless you prefer a male SANE nurse, then I can do it.”

“Sane nurse?” Will asked.

“Sexual assault nurse examiner,” the nurse clarified, still only addressing Will. “They do the SAFE kits. Uh, sexual assault forensic evidence kit.”

The nurse rolled out some of the examination table paper and ripped off a large amount before laying it on the floor. Kurt and Will stared at him. He turned to Will and said, “Has your _son_ changed his clothes since the assault?”

Something about how the nurse was acting was making Will uncomfortable, or rather how Kurt was reacting to the nurse was making him uncomfortable. Kurt was as stiff as a board and had wrapped his arms around his body as if the nurse was raining down insults on him.

“I haven’t changed,” Kurt said stiffly.

“Your _son_ needs to undress over the paper to catch any of the debris.”

“Undress?!” Kurt said, shocked. The nurse didn’t even look at him.

The nurse said to Will, “There could be evidence that falls out of his clothing or off his skin. Has he showered or excreted waste since the assault?” 

“ _He_ is right here,” Kurt interjected. Will suddenly realized why he was uncomfortable—the nurse was treating Kurt like he wasn’t there at all, and was only speaking to Will.

The nurse breathed out long and slow, as if Kurt was intentionally annoying him, “Have you?”

“No, I haven’t. And I would prefer the female SANE nurse, because of the two of you she is definitely the saner choice. I also recommend you quit because you shouldn’t be working with any r-rape victims,” Kurt said, jaw high with a stiff upper lip like he was accepting the crown for junior prom queen.

The nurse’s mouth twisted in disgust and he pulled a thick envelope from one of the cabinets reading Ohio Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit and an unfolded packing box. He slit open the envelope and said, “Would you like to wait to fill out the incident report until the other nurse comes?”

“Yes,” Kurt hissed, “What do you need for the intake, or are you done here?”

The nurse breathed out hard again and said briskly, “Do you have history with drugs?”

“No.”

“Alcohol?”

“No.”

“Mental illness?”

“…No.”

He quirked a brow, smirked. Will bristled and Kurt looked about half a step from going for the jugular. The nurse moved on.

“Sexual history?”

“I’m a—,” Kurt choked mid-sentence, arms clasped hard around his middle. Will stared at him in concern, reaching out but not touching. Kurt corrected in a small voice, “I _was_ a virgin.”

“ _Any_ sexual history?” the nurse said, “I know you gays are a promiscuous lot. Handjobs? Oral—”

“What did you just say to him?!” Will asked, aghast, “‘You _gays_ ’? How _dare_ you?! What does that have to do with—”

“Mr. Schue,” Kurt said, resting a hand on the crook of his elbow, “I told you I’ve endured abuse my whole life. Doctors’ offices are no different. Sometime I should tell you about a doctor I had who made fun of my voice and offered to put me on HRT unironically.”

The nurse frowned, and clarified, “Absolutely no sexual history?”

“Barely been kissed virgin,” Kurt said, nodding balefully, “Second base, if either my _boyfriend_ or I had tits. That’s the one where you _breeders_ feel each other up above the waist, right?” Kurt paused a bit, and smirked at the nurse, “I guess it’s second base with girls, too. I’ve measured plenty of the girls for their clothes and touched Brittany’s breasts in my Mellencamp Period after making out with her. More than you, I’d say. Do you compensate for your tiny dick with a nice car on top of your homophobia and misogyny?”

“Kurt!” Will said then. He paused after Kurt turned his glare on him and continued, quietly, “There’s no need to lower yourself to their level.”

Kurt brushed his bangs across his brow again, and now that Will had decided it was a nervous habit, he couldn’t help but see it as anything but nervousness on an otherwise masterfully blank face.

The nurse frowned, nonplussed, said, “I’ll get the female SANE nurse. Change into the gown _over_ the sheets. And don’t have sex.”

“I want to stab him with a bitchfork,” Kurt muttered.

“A ‘bitchfork’?”

“It’s like stabbing and poking with a pitchfork and a torch, but I’m a pacifist so I just bitch, bitch, bitch until people listen to me and give in to me, because _I’m right_ ,” Kurt said, “A bitchfork.”

“Clever.”

“Yes,” Kurt said with a put-upon air, “I plan to write great musicals with the cleverest word play. I am a master of the written word, though currently unrecognized by the ignoramuses in this little town.”

Will didn’t remember that bravado leaving, but it must have because the last time he’d seen it was in Duets week, when he said he was the best singer and sang by himself. A defense mechanism, Will realized sadly, to go with the nervous habit. The smirking “bitch” in seven layers from his sophomore year was returning full force. Will hadn’t realized how much he’d grown until this huge step back happened. Kurt had opened up so much, but now it was like he’d never come out of his basement bedroom and lonely, friendless life. More than two years of emotional growth, completely gone.

“Turn around,” Kurt finally said after a quiet moment.

Will turned towards the door, hearing Kurt step onto the paper. It crinkled under his feet. Will heard the drag of fabric against fabric against skin and Kurt’s ragged breathing. Will thought Kurt might be the type person to fold his clothes when he took them off, maybe saying something about preserving the line of the silhouette or the quality of the fabric. Will heard Kurt crinkling paper just before something flumped on the floor—one of his shoes, he realized, when a similar crinkle and flump followed. He heard the rustling of fabric against skin again and was assaulted by the image of some man, maybe old and creepy like Sandy Ryerson, moving Kurt around on the hotel sheets like a limp, fleshy, sex doll, like he didn’t look doll like enough with his Hummel-figurine features, ripping open Kurt’s shirt, buttons flying everywhere, maybe pocketing Kurt’s ‘bolo-tie,’ unbuttoning Kurt’s skin tight pants and wrestling them only down to his mid-thigh because they were too hard to take off, and then…. Will didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t stop himself from imagining it. It was too easy to think of, horrific enough that his brain just latched onto it and wouldn’t let go of it.

Kurt grabbed the hospital gown from his hand and put it over himself. Will turned and offered to tie the back of it where it was harder to reach. Kurt scoffed and reminded him that he laced himself into a corset, easily enough.

“I never understood why you were okay with wearing skirts and heels and corsets to school but didn’t want to play Frank in Rocky Horror,” Will said as Kurt sat on the examination table.

Kurt rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

“Then explain it to me,” he said, crossing his arms.

“I’ve spent my whole life looking like this, sounding like this, being exactly who I am,” Kurt swallowed, “and the entire time people have acted like I’m a woman, a little girl, a chick with a dick. As if my balls had been cut off and I was a castrato.”

“But you don’t—”

“Don’t you remember my Mellencamp Phase?” Kurt asked him rhetorically, rolling his eyes again, “I don’t _pass_. I’m gayer than Emmett on Queer as Folk, and Tim Gunn, and all five of the guys on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy put together. But I’m the G not the T.”

“The G…?”

“It’s LGBT,” Kurt clarified condescendingly, “And some other letters now, but I’m positive you’ve never heard of any of the rest of it. The G stands for gay men. The T stands for transgender people. We are separate but equal, but less racist. Or we’re supposed to be less racist. I’m not trans. I don’t wear women’s clothes because I want to be a woman or I want to be treated like a woman or because I want to look like a woman—let’s be honest, I would make a _hideous_ woman. I wear women’s clothes, _sometimes_ , to make a point, to make a fashion statement, or because it’s gorgeous and looks gorgeous on me.” Kurt paused and quirked a brow, “And I’ve only worn a skirt a handful of times, and never to school.”

“That’s not true,” Will scoffed.

“I’ve worn an Alexander McQueen _wrap_ , and a kilt, but those are both definitely for men. And the Lady Gaga dress was a dress not a skirt, that I wore leggings with. I’ve worn women’s sweater dresses, knee-length sweaters, sweaters, vests, heels, tights, shirts, accessories and pants, but the vast majority of my wardrobe are made by men for men. And if you can’t recognize that, it’s because A., you’re a bigoted midwestern man, and that’s okay. Finn’s my brother after all. And B., you don’t have a Vogue subscription and I doubt you watch Project Runway or read the Fashion Week so you don’t see or even at least recognize haute couture until I walk in wearing it.”

“But that doesn’t explain why you weren’t willing to do Frank.”

“Have you ever _watched_ Rocky Horror?” Kurt asked, aghast.

“Yes.”

“Frank has sex with both Brad _and_ Janet _and_ Rocky—played by Finn and Rachel and Sam, no less! I was absolutely not touching that with a ten foot long pole. I am not actively suicidal! And I am more than how I play with gender roles—how I dress makes _me_ feel better, makes _me_ feel in control of an otherwise uncontrollable situation, makes _me_ feel confident and proud—but I am more than my clothes and my voice and my face. Putting on a corset and makeup for a homophobic, gays-are-slutty-rapists role makes me look _weak_ , and I am _not_ a woman trapped in a man’s body. Sometimes I try and imagine growing breasts and waking up with a vagina, and all it fills me with is huge disgust. I am not trans. I am not even a drag queen, though that seems intriguing from a performer’s perspective. I don’t even want to play the women’s roles on Broadway—though I absolutely would not say no to something like Elphaba, let’s be honest. I am a man. I want to be treated like a _man_ ,” and suddenly a tear fell down Kurt’s cheek and then another. He touched a drop with a finger and stared at the wetness, as if he was shocked he was crying at all.

Will moved to pull Kurt into a hug. He perched his head on top of Kurt’s as Kurt clung to him, silently crying and furiously wiping at his face, muttering about how his face was going to be all puffy and splotchy again.

“Why did this happen to _me_?” Kurt whispered finally into the crook of Will’s neck, “Why me? Why is the whole world acting like I’m some sort of, some sort of woman? Why is it treating me like a woman pretending to be a man?”

“I’m sorry,” Will whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

* * *

 Kurt said monotonously after another forty-five minutes of silence, laying on the table with his legs off the end as, “Do you think they make it this hard to make a report on purpose?”

Will had nothing to say to that, his mouth going dry.

* * *

 After almost another forty-five minutes, the female SANE nurse arrived, followed by another woman.

The nurse was white with short black hair, short and plump in her pink scrubs. The woman behind her was wearing a nice suit, black, and smiling as warmly as she could.

“Aren’t you in the same church choir as Mercedes Jones?” Kurt asked blithely before blushing.

“I am!” the woman said brightly, “Are you a friend of hers?”

Kurt paused visibly, blinking furiously as if to clear away tears. “I-I am. We’re in Glee together.”

“I’m Donna Michaels. I’m your victims advocate,” she said warmly, as the nurse opened the SAFE kit envelope and arranged a very large series of packages, envelopes, and papers on the table, “And you are?”

“Kurt,” He shook her hand and added after a pause, “Hummel. Kurt Hummel.”

“Are you related to the owner of Hummel Tires & Lube?”

“Yeah.” Kurt smiled. “He’s my dad. Burt Hummel.”

She squealed and said, “How adorable! Burt and Kurt Hummel!”

Kurt’s smile dropped off his face. “Are you gonna tell my dad I’m here?”

“No,” she said, smile fading a little, “You don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want to, and I can’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.” She gestured to Will, “And you are?”

Will gave her a hand and she raised a brow at it before shaking it more briskly than Kurt’s. He forced a smile. “I’m Will Schuester. I’m the supervisor for Glee and the Spanish teacher.”

She turned to Kurt again, smiling far more warmly at him than at Will—the opposite of that male nurse then, preferring Kurt to Will. “Do you want him to stay with us, Kurt?”

“I—,” Kurt paused, looking between them and then blushed again, ducking his head, “I do want him to stay.”

“Alright, baby,” Donna said, “You can tell him to leave at any time, or for me to leave if you want. Richard told us you wanted a female SANE nurse?”

“His name is Richard?” Kurt laughed lightly, “That’s fitting because he was a real dick.” Will laughed before he could stop himself and he caught the female nurse suppressing a smile.

Donna nodded and said, “I can see why you wanted Nurse Rosie then!”

Nurse Rosie turned around and said, “Do you want to fill out the incident report first, or last?”

Kurt brushed his hair across his brows and his eyes landed on his lap.

“Does that mean you’re pressing charges? Is that what presses the charges?” Will asks for Kurt.

“Not necessarily,” Donna answered, looking between the two men, “It just helps Nurse Rosie to pay attention to certain areas or skip over certain steps if you want her to. The kit can go in the system as an anonymous kit, which can help mark a pattern of predation and can connect other cases to it. It’s also for statistical purposes—all anonymous of course—but we can give it to the police, too. We can call the police if that’s what you want, Kurt. And if you don’t want to press charges right now, the incident report will stay with the kit for if and when you do press charges, until the statute of limitations expires.”

“I,” Kurt looked up at Will again, “I think I want to press charges.”

“That’s alright, then,” Donna replied with a bright smile.

Rosie turned around, hands gloved in green latex and said, “So report first or last, sweetie?”

“...First.”

Together, Donna, Rosie and Kurt filled out his name again, the date, his address, and his phone, until they got to the more difficult questions.

“Where were you assaulted? Do you know the address?”

“I woke up in a motel room at a place called Hott Chix.”

“Can you tell us what happened?” Rosie asked. Will was standing near the door, feeling kind of useless and uncomfortable. Donna was sitting on a chair, holding Kurt’s hand.

“No,” Kurt said quietly, looking at Donna’s deep brown eyes, “Not really.”

“Not really?” Rosie repeated. She gave Donna a look.

Donna said, “Were you drugged or drunk during the assault?”

“I’m not sure,” Kurt said, voice shaking, “I don’t remember drinking. I don’t remember much of anything.”

Rosie asked, “Was it your motel room? Do you remember being in the motel?”

Kurt shook his head. “Last I remember I was in Scandals. It’s a bar. I was there with my,” he paused with a contemplative look at Donna and then at Rosie, as if gauging them, “boyfriend and a couple of mutual acquaintances.”

“Did they leave before you, or were they still there the last you remember, or were they in the motel with you?”

“Blaine, my boyfriend, had left,” Kurt paused for a moment, swallowing, “Sebastian Smythe was still there, I think, but I thought he’d gone off with a trick or something. My friend at the bar was still there. No one was with me when I woke up. I woke up alone and I was naked.”

“Completely naked?” Rosie asked, having already bagged his clothes in a paper bag.

Kurt nodded, face pale. “My bolo tie, vest and underwear were gone. My shirt was missing some buttons and was across the room. My pants were on the floor at the edge of the bed. My wallet and keys were still in my pocket and my watch—it’s a pocket watch on a chain—so I wasn’t robbed.”

“Was your car in the parking lot of the motel?”

Kurt shook his head. “The motel was what? One? Two miles away?” He looked up at Will, questioningly.

“Were you at the bar with him?” Donna asked him, some sort of edge to her words.

“No,” Will replied, confused why she was asking. “Kurt called me this morning around 5. He was in the motel bathroom, crying.”

“Why’d he have your number?”

“I gave all my Glee kids my phone number in case they needed a way to get home.”

“Most of us have been troubled kids in the past,” Kurt interjected quickly, “Not Mercedes obviously, but we’ve had a teenage pregnancy, a kid in juvie who also used to turn tricks,” Will stared at Kurt in shock. Puck used to turn tricks?! Or was that an exaggeration? “I think Finn had some sort of weed problem, and one girl faked a stutter. We have reformed bullies, many victims of bullying, and I used to,” he paused, “I used to drink a bit. At school. It’s on my record. I haven’t drank since my sophomore year though, because it, you know, sucks. Mr. Schue told us he’d rather us be safe and unafraid to call someone to get us home. I, um, woke up in the motel bed and thought I was hungover so I called Mr. Schue. But I don’t remember drinking at all. I had a couple of Shirley Temples with extra cherries. I don’t know if I was drugged or if I just got wasted and can’t remember it.”

Will wondered briefly why Kurt had word-vomited all over Donna and Rosie, before it occurred to him that Donna suspected Will of somehow being at Scandals with Kurt, or being some sort of sexual predator giving his phone number to his kids, or maybe being Kurt’s lover. He recoiled internally, and then felt thankful for Kurt’s forethought and instinctive improv. Glee for reforming troubled kids? Perfect cover!

“Do you want us to test for drugs and alcohol?” Rosie asked. Kurt nodded. She filled in a few more spots on the form. “Do you have an idea of how you were assaulted?”

Kurt asked miserably, “Where else can you even be assaulted?”

“You believe there was sexual contact to your anus, your mouth, your penis?”

Kurt blushed harder and a tear fell. Donna glared at Rosie and pulled a packet of tissues from her large purse, handing one to Kurt. Kurt blew his nose and tossed it into the trashcan in the corner of the room. Kurt continued, “I don’t know, but definitely the, uh, um.”

Rosie took pity and said, “We’ll swab them all, alright?”

Kurt’s and Will’s faces both curled slightly in disgust and despair.

“Do you have any bitemarks? Bruises? Scratches?” Rosie asked, reading off the sheet, “Richard was supposed to go through the report with you as you were changing to collect the any photographs and swabs from open injuries.”

Kurt’s face burned and he turned to look at Will in a panic, clutching Donna’s hand hard, “I, um, I, yes. Bites and bruises. I don’t know about scratches?”

“Do you consent to photographs of the injuries and swabs for evidence?”

“Sure, but,” he paused and bowed his head, “Can Mr. Schue, can you turn around again?”

“Do you want me to go in the hall?” Will asked gently, half-hoping because he didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to hear Kurt fall apart again.

“No.” Will turned dutifully as Kurt took the gown back off.

“Do you consent to bite-mark and secretion swabbing? We’ll put a black light over your skin and swab wherever there are revealed secretions,” he heard Rosie ask.

“Yes,” Kurt whispered, sounding near tears again.

He heard a paper being ripped, presumably a packet holding sterile swabs, and a camera shutter going off.

"Can I examine these contusions here? .... Does this feel tender?" Rosie asked several times, probably prodding Kurt's bruises. Will didn't hear him answer. "Breathe deep for me now," she said, and then, "Good."

After several painful moments of near silence, outside of a several more camera shutters and Donna whispering loudly in Kurt’s ear that, “You’re gonna be okay. I promise, baby, almost done then you can put the gown back on. You’re gonna be okay,” Kurt told him he could turn back around. Will turned back around and Donna offered him her seat. He took it and took Kurt’s hand.

“Do you consent to oral swabs?” Rosie asked, “I will take a swab, a medical grade cotton swab like the ones for the bites, to your inner cheeks, your gums, your tongue, and the back of your throat for trace evidence, and then one with a bucchal swab—that’s the one that looks like an itty bitty comb—to distinguish your own DNA.”

Kurt nodded. Will watched, clutching Kurt’s hand tight. After that, Rosie rubbed the swab ends on some glass slides. She pulled the swabs from where they dried on the other glass slides, put the swabs in marked boxes. She closed the slides. She picked up the boxes and slides, gently putting them in the white collections packaging box.

“Do you consent to fingernail scrapings?” Rosie asked.

“It’s like a manicure!” Donna interrupted with a big smile, “Rosie hear will clean out everything underneath your fingernails over this little piece of paper.”

Kurt nodded. Will was glad he had gotten something right with Kurt on this horrible day, telling him not to pick at his nails.

Rosie wrapped up the tools-that-looked-like-toothpicks-but-obviously-weren’t (As Will called them) and the papers before putting them in a small marked envelope.

“Do you consent to combing through your head and pubic hair?” Rosie interrupted Kurt’s half-hearted protest, “To collect an attacker’s pubic hair if it has been left behind as well anything caught in your head hair that may be useful evidence.”

“I—sure, but Mr. Schue, can you…?”

Will dutifully turned around. After a long period of time, he could hear Kurt’s breathing hitch a bit. —“Do you consent to perianal and anal swabs? It will collect—.”—

Will’s gut twinged in disgust and loathing for Kurt’s rapist.

“Just do it all, Nurse Rosie,” Kurt said flatly, completely monotone and world-weary, “Please just…do it all.”

“Do you consent to penile swabs—”

“Yes!”

“Now that you’ve told us you believed you’ve been drugged—Mr. Schuester, you can turn around now, if you would like—We’ll draw two vials of blood and a urine sample. Do you consent to this?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, dearie, almost done,” Donna said, grinning at Kurt, patting his hand.

“We will provide you with antibiotics, antivirals and prophylaxis for STIs and HIV but would you like to go ahead with STI testing regardless?”

“Yes.”

“That will be another vial of blood.”

Donna smiled at him apologetically as Rosie took three vials of blood, and handed him a small plastic cup. Kurt left and returned in embarrassment.

“That’s it, dearie.”

“Do I have to go to the police station next, or are you sending the report to them yourself?”

“I’ll call them to come here and talk to you, baby,” Donna said, “And I’ll stay with you unless you want me to leave even when the police come, and come with you afterwards.”

“What’s gonna happen to my clothes?” Kurt asked, watching Rosie box up the last of the evidence, including his clothes and shoes.

“You’ll get them back after we get the evidence off of them,” Rosie told him.

Donna lifted a brow at her and turned to Kurt. “Honestly, you might not get them back at all, but that’s all right, isn’t it, sweetie?”

Will thought Donna was asking Kurt to poke her with his ‘bitchfork’ because she clearly had no idea about his relationship with his clothes. Kurt will never love a man like he loves his clothes. To Will’s surprise, Kurt didn’t say anything but, “I don’t think I can go home in a hospital gown. I stopped carrying an extra set of clothes to school at the beginning of the year when I saw slushies were going out of season.”

Rosie clearly wanted to ask about the slushies but Donna already pulled a set of clothes from her large bag and handed them to Kurt. The shirt was baggy and white, the pants were grey sweatpants, the briefs were white and plain, and the shoes were cheap flipflops. Kurt only wrinkled his nose a little bit when he said, “Thank you.”

* * *

Donna led Will and Kurt to the cafeteria and bought them all bland hospital food while they waited for the cops. Will was shocked the exam had taken over two and a half hours—Donna was sure to tell him they usually took much longer when he complained. 

“They still have the green Jell-O!” Kurt commented happily.

Maybe it wasn’t bland to Kurt, but Kurt was always different, Will thought not unkindly.

“Come here often?” Donna asked, half joking, half worried.

“My dad was in the hospital last year. I practically lived here. They made me go home at night and I had to go to school, but otherwise I was here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Donna said, frowning sympathetically.

“It’s alright,” Kurt smiled half-heartedly. After a second and a spoonful of Jell-O, he said, “Does it get better?”

“Does what?”

“This,” Kurt said, gesturing to himself, “Do I ever stop… wondering what he did to me? Do I ever stop being this, this _victim_?”

“You’re not a victim,” Donna said sternly, “You’re a _survivor_.”

“I don’t feel like a survivor,” Kurt whispered, “I feel like I’m dying.”

Will grabbed Kurt’s hand across the table. “You’ll be okay, Kurt.”

Donna shot Will another look and laid a hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “Oh baby, you’ll feel better with time. But you won’t be the same. You can try and try and try and act like some scumbag didn’t hurt you, but he did. He did, and it’s done, and you’ll never really know, but you have to know you’re better than him. You’re better than what happened.”

Will didn’t like how Kurt was looking at the table instead of at either of them.

* * *

When the cops came, they made Will leave the room as to “not influence the victim’s testimony.”

"Kurt, do you want me to stay?" Donna asked him, clutching his hand between both of hers. Will paused in the doorway, watching him. 

Will watched Kurt look from her to the police and then bite his lip. He seemed torn. 

"Whatever you want, baby," Donna said, "It's your choice. It's important for you to choose, yourself. Do you want me to stay or go?"

"I can do this on my own," Kurt said, nodding. 

"Alright, baby."

But when Donna and Will returned, Kurt was in tears. He refused to talk about it, but Donna was already talking over his soft sobs and Will’s questions, saying, “Oh baby, it’s alright! It’s alright! The police were just doing their jobs….”

“They weren’t,” Kurt whispered, eyes on his lap, mouth twisted as he tried to repress his tears. “They said since I was gay I was probably just….” He shook his head, despite Donna’s objections and honest sympathy.

"I'll talk to them," Donna said firmly, "I'm your advocate. It's my job to advocate for you. They are not supposed to treat you like that. I'm gonna talk to them—"

"No," Kurt said, monotone. "It's done. I'm done." He swallowed and stood up, turned to Will: “I just want to go home. Can you take me back to Scandals so I can get my car?”

Donna offered to go to the bar herself and drive Kurt’s car home for him, but Kurt flatly refused. Will could do nothing else but acquiesce to Kurt’s monotone request. His emotions seemed completely gone, and his face was completely blank. His fingers were curled around the edge of the too-big cheap t-shirt, as if he was trying to pull it down over his thighs completely.

Kurt was silent the entire thirty minute drive back to Scandals in West Lima, despite Will’s half-hearted attempts of conversation and attempts to get Kurt to talk about how the cops treated him and attempts to vocalize his outrage over the cops’ bigotry and uselessness. At the parking lot of the empty bar, and the near empty parking lot, Will looked at the bar building. It was just a normal brick building with a black rook, with a dead, red LED reading Scandals and thick wooden door and simple lamp handing over it. All the streetlights and building lights were turned off and the pavement glistened with last night’s rain.

Kurt opened Will’s car door and stepped out. He walked briskly to his car, a white pharmaceutical bag with his STI-antibiotics clutched in one fist and his keys clutched in the other. Will remembered his hand in that blank white emergency room, crushing his fingers as the nurse swabbed and catalogued the remains of the attack.

He watched as Kurt turned on his car, a big black beast of slick metal, and drove away without a backwards glance, ignoring Will’s half-hearted wave.

Finally, after a moment of sitting alone in the parking lot of Lima’s only gay bar, he looked at his watch. It was five past noon. They’d been together for almost eight hours. He sighed and pressed his fist to his mouth, almost in prayer or resignation or defeat, or all three, then he hit the ignition and started his way home.

Will turned on his car radio, and the radio sang:

“ _And I can't get it out of my head,_  
_no, I can't get it out of my head._  
_Now my old world is gone for dead_  
_'cos I can't get it out of my head….”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IRL/Canon Note:  
> The very end of Chris Colfer’s known range is a flat B5 (proven when he sung live on stage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-FeTzNFj18 at around 4:17), 1.5 notes above the G5 in Season 3 “Not the Boy Next Door.” To be fair, maybe he lost some notes when his voice deepened between Seasons 1 and 3, though I doubt it. When you sing as often as professionals, you tend to keep your notes—transmen, for example, including Alexander James (previously Heather Alexander, a folk artist) can keep their high notes as their voices drop if they keep singing through their hormonal transitioning.
> 
> Research Notes:  
> The vast majority of survivors know their attackers, if only acquaintances at the time.
> 
> When someone reports a rape at the police station, the police do take them to the hospital for a rape/SAFE kit. Men can and do get rape kits. Both male and female survivors often experience large obstacles to getting rape kits and I took Kurt’s complaint about how hard they make the experience almost directly from a forum asking about other survivors’ experience with rape kits, quoting, “Do you guys make it this hard on purpose to prevent people from filing reports?”
> 
> I found huge difficulty in finding male survivors’ experiences with rape kits and reporting (I found exactly two references to the fact that men do in fact receive rape kits, though neither expanded about the experience), so how I portray it is adapting the very few experiences shared on the internet by female survivors and adding a heavy dose of what I understand of how men experience rape, reporting, and applying how western society socializes men and women very differently.
> 
> What I’ve described about the rape/SAFE kit Kurt goes through is the full kit. Not all survivors go through all the steps and not all receive ideal care. I found difficulty in finding whether or not a man would get the benefit of a victims’ advocate, but I just decided to give him one (which he was also blessed to have access to). Kurt actually received one of the more ideal experiences with a SANE nurse—some hospitals don’t have up-to-date SANE nurses (nurses trained specifically for rape/SAFE kits) on hand, and try and make due with doctors, trainees, or nurses who technically have SANE training that is outdated and unpracticed.
> 
> If you are sexually assaulted (1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men, in the starkest statistics, will be assaulted in their lifetime, with the majority assaults occurring in college and adolescence though they can happen at other points in life, including well past retirement age), the rape/SAFE kit collects evidence and is most effective within the first 96 hours, especially if you do not shower and save the clothes you were wearing at the time in a paper bag. It is not necessarily a report to the police, though that can be included, but it saves the evidence in case you decide to try and press charges, even at a later time. There are resources for you: hotlines, support groups, specialized psychologists, advocates, and forums on the internet. It is and was not your fault and you are not alone in your experience.
> 
> Your sexuality, your gender, your race, your clothes, your behavior, and your circumstances did not cause you to be assaulted, and you are not at fault, despite what several men and women will tell you. The best way to think of this is to image a person is wearing a nice watch, and someone points a gun at their back and orders them to give them the watch. Was it the watch-wearers fault for wearing the nice watch in the first place, or the robber’s fault for robbing them? It was the robber’s fault for breaking the law, just like it is the assailant’s fault for assaulting someone. It’s also important to recognize that a woman can assault and abuse men and women just as well as a man can.


	2. Kept Under Your Hat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The week directly following the assault, Kurt tries to carry on as normal, trying to move on as quickly as possible, and prepares for West Side Story.
> 
> (Or rather, the author introduces the POVs of most of the major characters, and plants the seeds for later plot and development and not much else).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Kept under your hat” is an idiom basically meaning keeping a secret.
> 
> The excerpt at the beginning is from “Why Stay?” sung by the main character Diana in _Next to Normal_. The song excerpted at the end is “Big lie, small world,” by Sting. 
> 
> This chapter is a little all over the place, because I’m introducing several characters’ reactions to the week after what happened. People don’t really spend over eight hours together like Kurt and Will did last chapter. The lines are time skips and sometimes POV changes. I don’t believe in physically marking POV changes with whose speaking, and try and keep their different tones rather distinctive (another goal for this chapter is to introduce the distinctive character tones). The chapter also begins to depart from certain canon characterizations.
> 
> After further research, I discovered the Scandals scene in 3x05 was apparently on a Wednesday (“Drag Queen Wednesday”), but why would Sebastian take Blaine (and Kurt) to a bar on a school night? He gave Blaine alcohol, too. What about their hangovers? I thought it was on a Friday, logically, so I moved it. Then it screwed up the canon timelines. But like Tim Gunn says, I made it work. 
> 
> Also. I had more planned for this chapter - two other scenes, to be exact. But I wanted this to be done by Thursday, so those got bumped to Chapter 3, and then the thematic songs had to change, and it was just a hot mess. Am I satisfied with this chapter? No. Am I posting this chapter anyway? Yes.

_“So steadfast and stolid_  
_And stoic and solid_  
_for day after every day”_  
-Diana, "Why Stay?” _Next to Normal_.

 

Burt was completely furious.

Kurt had told him at dinner that Friday that he was going to see a double feature with Blaine in Columbus and that he’d be home late, but when Burt had gone to check on him this morning, he wasn’t there. This was even worse than when he had found Blaine passed out drunk in Kurt’s bed. He grabbed the top wooden bar on one of the dining table chairs and glared at that stupid phone on the table. If Kurt was _here_ , he’d be flitting about, trying to shove him into an arm chair and saying this much tenseness was bad for his back and this much stress was bad for his heart—but Kurt _wasn’t_ here and he was the cause of all this stress.

How dare that boy lie to him?! How dare he take off with his boyfriend, without a single call?! Who knows where they went! Who knows where Blaine, that stupid, helmet-headed, _oh-sir-I-wouldn’t-_ dare _-take-advantage-of-Kurt!_ , boy had taken him! Who knows what they were doing all night—Well, Burt had a few guesses as to what Blaine was doing to Kurt all night, but that just made his pulse quicken faster and his teeth grind to nubs.

_Oh Dad, how can people vote for you if your teeth don’t exist anymore because I ran off with my boyfriend?!_

“Let’s try calling again,” Carole said, looking up at him. She was sitting at the dinner table and Burt was pacing the along the kitchen floor.

“I’ve tried that!” he said. He tried and failed to not shout, “I must’ve called fifteen-twenty times by now and this kid is not picking up!”

“How about Blaine?” Carole suggested, trying to maintain a beseeching smile.

“Oh, I bet that punk wouldn’t dare answer my calls today!”

“They’ve been together almost a year, now,” she said with a shrug, “We should have been expecting this, really.”

Burt flumped into a chair next to her, dropping his head in his hands. “I don’t get why he couldn’t just be honest about this.”

Carole pursed her lips and said, “Did you ever tell your parents about spending the night with your girlfriend?”

“No, but I was a completely different kid! I thought Kurt was better than this! More mature, more serious, more—” innocent, he didn’t say, delicate.

Carole rubbed his arm. “I’m sure Kurt and Blaine both took this very seriously. It’s not like they just jumped into bed seconds after getting together. Honestly, I would’ve expected that of any other pair of teenaged boys.”

“Kurt’s not like that!” Burt said, …, “He’s all—!” Too many words came, and they all lodged in his throat. He stretched his hands out before them.

“That’s exactly right,” Carole said gently, “Kurt’s different and that’s such a good thing.”

“He couldn’t even lie about it?!” Burt snapped, “Really?! He couldn’t have said he was sleeping over with Mercedes or Tina or any of those girlfriends of his?”

“He _was_ a bit too honest,” she said with a forced laugh, “He told you he was with Blaine, and he’s….” Burt looked at her wide eyed. For his sake, she better not say anything about whatever-the-hell that boy was doing to his son. He always knew that boy was a bad influence! Drinking, convincing Kurt to confront homicidal bullies, and now—!

They both heard tires come up the drive way.

“I’m gonna kill him!” Burt promised, muttering under his breath, “I’m gonna cut his brake lines, or make a car fall on him at the shop when those kids in Glee are practicing in the back room, Make it look like an acc—”

“ _Burt_ ,” Carole said, laughing a bit.

Maybe he didn’t say it quiet enough.

Well, they’re married now, so she can’t testify against him. Kurt could, but…. One day Kurt will understand. After he’s thirty-five and married.

They listened to the ignition quiet and then light footsteps trot up the driveway. They hovered in the kitchen. Burt was just waiting to pounce, wondering whatever happened to his sweet little boy and sure in the fact that that Blaine kid had absolutely everything to do with his disappearance.

Burt watched from the doorway of the kitchen as his little boy opened the door and peered around a bit. He quietly closed the door behind him and made a bee-line for the stairs, but Burt intercepted from behind.

“Late night?”

“Not now, Dad.”

“Not now?” Burt repeated, face reddening, “Really?!”

“Yes. I’m not in the mood to deal with this.”

“Not in the _mood_?”

Kurt tried to move around him, but Burt was stockier than Kurt and used to play defense in JC.

Kurt glared at him. Something seemed off about how Kurt looked, but Burt couldn’t see what.

“What happened last night was not okay!”

Kurt quietly said, trying to shift around him, “Won’t happen again. Promise.” Burt tried to block him again, but Kurt nimbly shifted under the arm and trotted up the stairs.

“We’re gonna talk about this!”

“No, we’re not.”

“Kurt!” He grabbed Kurt’s wrist.

Kurt whipped around with a snarl, “Let. Me. Go!” He jerked away and started to stomp up the stairs as quickly as possible.

“You’re right, we don’t have to talk about this!” he called after him, “But something’s wrong. Did he hurt you?”

Kurt whipped around, eyes wide—signs of shock and horror—and asked _sotto voice_ “What did you say?”

Burt stopped cold. “Did he hurt you? Did something happen? You seem….”

Kurt’s back shifted a bit, relaxing, maybe. “Blaine?” he said quietly, still staring, still clutching the banister, white-knuckled. He blinked furiously and forced a brief laugh. “ _Blaine_ would never hurt me.”

Burt didn’t understand the emphasis on the kid’s name, didn’t understand why his son was so intent on running away, didn’t understand why he was so upset. “Did something happen?” he shouted up the stairs.

Kurt didn’t answer, slamming his bedroom door. In the reverberating silence, they heard the lock click shut.

He turned to Carole, hoping she’d be able to interpret this, but the pinched, wide-eyed look on her face said it all. Neither of them knew exactly what was going on here, but they both knew something had changed.

* * *

He sighed heavily as he slid down his locked bedroom door. He rested his head in his hands. How could this have happened? He tried to lift his head, but it felt too heavy and his neck too weak. Weak, he scoffed to himself. He was weak.

Somehow, seconds, minutes, hours later he lifted his head. It felt like an accomplishment, kind of like the first time he was able to lift himself out of the dumpster with dignity instead of sprawling on the ground. The feeling of standing with grace seconds after being disgraced, just to turn up his nose at his abusers.

He stiffly got to his feet.

Every step was hard, barely a shuffle forward. _I am Boq_ , he mused, _the Tin Woodman_. A horrible event turned his heart to dust and his body has rusted to immobility.

His neck ached. _Too tense_ , Blaine would complain and then grab his shoulders in a surprise-massage, which was more of a teasing, loving grope rather than anything effective.

Let's not think about groping right now.

He made his way to his vanity and slumped into his wire chair, evaluating himself. The harsh lights around his mirror for optimal coverage suddenly seemed garish on his skin. His cheeks seemed sunken, his fact gaunt. Or maybe he was imagining it. He peered at his pores, huge and oily without his astringent and exfoliant and hydrating face mask, and at the circles under his eyes.

"Should’ve bought that color correcting palette," he muttered, stretching the purpled skin under his eye.

He shifted and the scratchy polyester rubbed against him harshly. _You're so spoiled_ , he scoffed to himself. _An hour in polyester and you're whining already_.

 _Spoiled_ , his brain repeated. _You're spoiled in_ _every. Single. Way_.

His traitorous, traitorous mind. He stiffened in his vanity chair and closed his eyes hard. He wanted to carve out his own eyes, to draw a knife beneath his chin and pull all his skin right off, to set himself alight on a funeral pyre. He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at his crown for a second. He admonished himself for pulling on his hair—you’ll damage the roots that way, he admonished himself _._ Baldness already ran in his family after all, but he (hopefully) inherited his impeccable hairline from his mother.

His bangs fell back in his face.

His face itched.

Quicker than a viper, quicker than thought, he grabbed his exfoliation pad and dragged it down hard against his cheek, like sandpaper against wood. He scrubbed again and again and again and again until his whole face was red and raw and a couple of his pores looked seconds away from bleeding.

Now his shoulders itched. His neck. His chest.

He pulled the cheap shirt off in one motion and tossed it across the room. He heaved, breathing hard, and grabbed the exfoliation pad again and scrubbed it across his chest and neck and shoulders and nipples and kept rubbing until he felt like his skin was completely ripped off.

Trapped, he thought, you're trapped. We’re trapped _._ This is prison.

Shut up, he told himself. Shut up, shut up, shut up. _Get ahold of yourself, Hummel!_

He grabbed a bristle brush, a cheap, plastic one he must have confiscated from Carole, and dragged it hard along his scalp. There were bugs under his skin. Tiny, microscopic bugs with millions of babies hatching all under his flesh, crawling all along his nerves, feeding on his muscles. He could feel them inside him, trailing down his body, touching everywhere. Touching everywhere, and he couldn't _stop them from touching him_.

He dragged the brush harder and harder across his scalp, his face, his back until white-hot pain burst behind his eyes, and then he stared at his face again. He watched his reflection heave, breathless, red and scratched up like Brittany’s cat had thought he was wearing _Eau de Catnip_ and tried to tear it right out of him. His eyes trailed down his exposed skin.

 _Exposed,_ his traitorous, vile mind said, _you’re so exposed. You’re always so exposed_.

Shirtless, he could see the red lines all over his chest and face that he'd drawn across his skin, but beneath those there was deeper, purpler lines. The lines at his elbows and armpits where his shirt was forced off his unyielding body, and the dark creasing around his neck and under his earlobes where his bolo tie— _Blaine gave that to me, it was mine. You took so much from me already. You took that, too?!_ —was likely ripped off his neck. Purple ovals were brushed across the top of his shoulders, looking like bleached out stains whose edges sunk into the fabric before he could treat them properly. Bite marks— _Eat me_ , he had told a bully once; now someone had certainly tried to.

His eyes scrunched shut again. He didn't want to look anymore. He knew where all the injuries were. There was another bite just above his waistband, and in the flesh of his inner thigh. Stray purple fingerprints were splattered across his hips and just above his knees where someone had held him open and held him still.

“Most people,” Donna had said to him, meaning and failing to be soothing, “don't bruise that easy. Most people aren't bruised at all.”

Isn't this evidence? he thought, thinking about those stupid, stupid, stupid detectives. Is this not enough?

"Are you sure it wasn't just rough sex?" one had asked, with what Kurt thought was clichéd whiskey breath. "I'm sure that's, uh, normal for you, huh?"

He breathed out hard once, gave one last look to his scratched up red and purple and white skin, and turned away. He opened the doors to his walk-in closet and tried to fish out something beautiful. He'd mastered the distraction well. _Look at me, look at me, look at me, but don't see a thing. I'm not here. Look at me, and when you're done,_ look away.

Later, he’d have to text Blaine that he was rescheduling their outfits for the week. He’d have to storyboard a week of different clothing for the both of them so they don’t clash, they don’t mismatch, and they don’t reveal a thing.

* * *

Carole went up with a plate for dinner, but Kurt’s door wouldn’t budge.

“Your father’s worried.”

Silence.

“C’mon, Kurt.”

Silence.

“You have to eat.”

Silence.

She sighed, long-suffering, and pulled out the trump card. “We both know this amount of worrying isn’t good for his heart.”

The tumbles of the lock turned and Kurt’s glare was as intense as the laser of the Death Star. He didn’t say anything, but he kept his eyes on her as he stalked past her, intentionally jostling her with his body. She rolled her eyes but knew it was a win.

* * *

Burt hadn’t had a silent dinner with Kurt in years. Neither of them had much to talk about in the eight years between Kurt’s mother and Kurt coming out—Burt never knew what to say to him, and he knew Kurt probably felt much the same. But they’d gotten so much closer once there were no secrets between them. What changed? 

Burt watched his son drag his fork across his plate, heard the metal squeal against the lacquered surface. Finn was having a date with Rachel tonight, so the table was even quieter.

“Ready to talk about what happened?”

Kurt stiffened. Dropped the fork on the table. Stared at his plate.

“Buddy, I know you’re getting older and that you have certain…feelings.”

“Change the subject,” Kurt said coldly. He turned to Carole, “How’s work?”

Carole looked between Kurt’s and Burt’s eyes. Burt tried to tell her telepathically that she shouldn’t let him change the subject, but Carole ignored him. She launched into an exaggerated story, and both men tried to act like they were paying attention sympathetically.

But after the story was done, Burt turned back to Kurt. “What happened last night?”

“Nothing happened.”

Carole stood up, picking up their plates, and fleeing to the safety of the kitchen.

“I may not know much, but I know when there’s something wrong with my son.”

“There’s something wrong with me?” Kurt said, laughing sarcastically, “You’re delusional. Nothing happened. Blaine and I fought, that’s all.”

“What about?”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Kurt said, staring at the table again, slouching as if his strings were cut.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Burt offered, trying not to sound as awkward as he felt.

“I think I’ve made it perfectly clear that I don’t want to talk about it. We fought. The fight’s over. What the fight was about is moot. Goodnight.”

Kurt stood up, moving to the stairs.

“Please, Kurt,” Burt called after him, “Just… talk to me.”

Kurt turned again and leaned against the wall, staring at Burt. Burt waited for Kurt to say something. He could practically see the words on his tongue just waiting to fly. He waited for Kurt to speak—Kurt always had something to say, always, always, always.

But Kurt turned back and went up the stairs.

And he was left in silence.

* * *

“Hey. I was wondering if we could talk about—Crap!” He smoothed down the cardigan Kurt had picked out for him over the weekend and told his reflection, “You sound like a doofus. A complete doofus.” 

He grabbed his bowtie and flipped up his polo collar. It was a good sign, he tried to assuage himself, that Kurt had texted him about the wardrobe change over the weekend. That meant Kurt wasn’t mad enough at him to let their outfits clash considering Kurt had obviously changed his mind over what they were wearing that Monday. That meant Kurt still wanted to be seen with him, right? That meant he didn’t mess up enough to make Kurt want to break up with him and find someone clearly better than a boy who’d dance with some, some _interloper_ on a night he was meant to spend with Kurt, right? 

He took a deep breath and smiled at his reflection again, while he was tying his bowtie. “Kurt, hey, I was hoping to talk to you about what happened at Scandals. Clearly I—I sound like a complete idiot.” He breathed out hard, and tried again. “Kurt, I am so sorry about what I did at Scandals. I was clearly in the wrong and please, please, please don’t break up with me because I am a complete mess.” He shook his head.

It was moments like this that made Blaine wish Cooper acted anything like a real brother, or had a relationship with his parents like Kurt had with his dad. And it wasn’t like Blaine could call Burt and say that he got drunk and practically cheated on Kurt without signing his death certificate. And who else could he even talk to? He couldn’t talk to any of the Warblers, because they never really warmed up to Kurt’s eccentricities. He wouldn’t put it past any of them to bash Kurt as much as possible to get Blaine back at Dalton—they’d been mad enough that Kurt returned to McKinley after Regionals. He couldn’t talk to any of the New Directions because they were Kurt’s friends first, no matter how they treated Blaine right now—any single one of them could kill him. He couldn’t talk to Sebastian, who had everything to do with their relationship problems right now.

He had to make Kurt forgive him. He had to. Kurt was everything to him, absolutely everything. His best friend, his duet partner, his boyfriend-probably-future-husband.

He sat on his bed, and it shook with his weight under him. He fingered his phone and wrote half a dozen texts he never sent. Did he say “Good morning” as if it never happened? Did he text his apologies, even if that seemed contrite but insincere? Was he supposed to call? He did that all weekend: trying to find the right words, trying to find some way to fix this, but the words never came, not even after he’d spent half a day punching his punching bag in the garage.

He couldn’t remember that night very well, but he did remember trying to drag Kurt into his backseat against his will, and trying to initiate something as important as sex while completely drunk even after Kurt had firmly refused (and for a stupid play! A stupid, stupid play that was already driving them apart!). He never ever intentionally ignored Kurt’s desires before and the thought that he’d done that, and in that way—it just made his skin crawl. He remembered leaving the car, leaving Kurt ( _leaving Kurt!_ ). Remembered Kurt trying to follow him in his car so Blaine would be safe, and how did he repay his loving, attentive, sweet boyfriend? Shouting at him to stop smothering him! And he kept yelling, screaming—he couldn’t even remember what he’d said to Kurt, he couldn’t remember if he’d said something he could never take back—until Kurt finally let him walk away. 

Blaine felt horrible, and not just because he’d gotten a short-lived cold because it had started raining and he was too stubborn (stupid) to call Kurt for a ride after all.

He fiddled with his buttons again, and licked his lips. _Stop doing tha_ t, Kurt said in his head, _you’ll dry your lips out and I’m not kissing chapped lips_.

He stood up, faced his reflection and tried again.

* * *

Kurt didn’t sleep well. He had taken three sleeping pills that had eventually kicked in, but when he had awoken that Monday morning, he had the remnants of a dream floating through his mind.

“Rough night, babe?” someone had said, leaning against a car in a parking lot. It was drizzling, but that man was just standing in the rain. He couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like, what his face looked like. He couldn’t remember what else happened, what else was there. Like all dreams, he knew he was supposed to remember it, he’d just been inside of it! It had seemed so real, felt so real, and he was left unsettled by how the hole in his memory felt.

He slathered on color-correcting primer, then ivory foundation, then concealer, then translucent powder to set it. Flawless, he told himself, you are flawless. You are perfect. You are clean. You are untouchable.

 _That’s the problem, isn’t it, babe?_ his traitorous brain whispered. _You’re a liar_.

“Flawless,” he insisted to his reflection. Maybe he should add blush? He got his phone and almost texted Blaine to ask his opinion—oh wait. They aren’t talking right now. He breathed out hard.

He smoothed the edges of his silver vest, over his shirt over his undershirt tucked into his skinny jeans, and headed to the iron board to iron his jacket and his tie.

Just before he left, he remembered that he needed to take his pills.

He listened for Finn’s footsteps, slowly locked his bedroom door as if it would be quieter that way, and stepped over to his wardrobe. In the bottom drawer beneath the false bottom he’d stolen from his dad’s shop, was where he hid shameful things like lubricant and muscle mags. He pulled out the white, neatly labelled, paper bags from the hospital.

He swallowed dryly and opened the first bag, wincing at the crinkling noise, and shook out a pill from all four of the bottles. Two pills for the possible HIV exposure (and another pair for before bed), and two different antibiotics for the other STDs. He only had enough to last the rest of the week, and he’d have to get more prophylaxis from some sort of clinic. Nurse Rosie had emphasized that he needed to take it for a month straight, without missing a dose, or else the virus—if he had been infected—would completely integrate with his bloodstream. And he shouldn’t have sex with anyone until he stops taking it. And he needed to be tested again in three months, just in case it failed. And if it failed, if he’s one of the _lucky, lucky_ people that the PEP doesn’t work for, he’ll be taking pills for the rest of his vastly shortened life.

He’d sooner kill himself than spend the rest of his life that way. He already saw how that story ended. Years of nausea, migraines, aches, pain, nightmares, and for what? She was still dead at the end, and he would be, too.

He gagged on the pills; forced them down; left for school.

* * *

Blaine couldn’t find Kurt all morning. They didn’t have any of their classes together, because of the completely ridiculous fact that they were in different grades, and Kurt didn’t swing by his locker. He didn’t want to approach him, didn’t want to see Kurt turn him away, so he waited and waited, but Kurt still wasn’t there.

He rushed to lunch, wiping the sweat from his palms onto his corduroys.

He looked around the room, panning around to see where Kurt had gotten a table. Kurt always picked their lunch table because he was always there before Blaine. But Blaine couldn’t see his styled up hair, or any of his distinctive clothes. His mouth went dry, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, swallowing nothing but stale air.

He numbly approached the lunch line and got a tray.

“What’s wrong, Tony?” Rachel asked, sidling up next to him with a bright smile.

“Not now, Rachel.”

She frowned. “No, really. What’s wrong? Is it the play? Have you worked on—”

“Not _now_ ,” Blaine snapped, slamming his tray on a table he’d instinctively followed Rachel to.

“Is it,” she dropped her voice to just above a whisper. He suspected Rachel was incapable of whispering. “Is it what Artie talked about? Did something go wrong?”

“You could say that,” he scoffed.

“It went wrong for me, too,” she said, sitting with a flourish next to him, “I accidently told Finn why I wanted to do it all of a sudden, and he decided that he wouldn’t let me advance my career by using him. What about you? Did Kurt get mad too?”

Blaine licked his chapped bottom lip and scanned the room again. He stood up when he saw the back of a silver vest, but when the wearer turned, it was actually that brunette girl in AV club with a pixie cut. He sat down again, slowly.

“Something’s clearly wrong!” Rachel said, watching him, “Did you guys fight?”

“Yeah, and now Kurt’s not here, and he’s always here,” Blaine said, volume rising. “Do you think he’s gonna break up with me?”

“Kurt wouldn’t break up with you over something as silly as this,” Rachel said, trying to lay a comforting hand on Blaine’s arm, but Blaine had jerked away, pacing now.

“But it’s not silly! Not to Kurt, and not to me!” Blaine said, nearly shouting, “I did something stupid, and now Kurt’s not talking to me, and I might have ruined everything!”

Rachel stared at him, eyes wide. She pulled out her phone and sent a mass-text to the other Gleeks asking if any of them had seen Kurt, and then another text directly to Kurt.

Blaine sat down again, slouched over, the knuckles of one of his fists in between his teeth.

“He’s all I have,” he whispered, “He’s my one good thing.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Rachel said, as a few other Gleeks arrived at their table. She stood up, chin high. “Kurt’s missing. Have any of you seen him?”

“Haven’t seen Lady Hummel.” Santana shrugged. “Maybe he went to the bathroom because his period finally came.”

“Shut up!” Blaine yelled at her.

Santana raised a brow. “Hit a nerve, Hobbit?”

Quinn pursed her lips. “He was in Trig this morning. Where could he have gone?”

“Is dumpster tossing back in style?” Mercedes suggested.

“Sorry, I’m late,” Kurt said, dropping next to Blaine.

Blaine visibly sagged in relief.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Blaine said, eyes roving over Kurt. Was he sitting more stiffly than usual? Did something happen? Did someone slushy him? His hair looked dry….

“I’m here now,” he said. Kurt looked over at Blaine’s untouched tray and said, “You have to eat.”

“Oh-Okay!” Blaine said, opening his utensil packet. Was Kurt forgiving him? Was everything okay?

 “We’ll talk later,” Kurt said under his breath, as the other Gleeks launched into a conversation over French fries vs. tater tots.

Blaine waited for Kurt to say something like, “If you guys eat any of that, I’ll have to alter your costumes, and I am not altering your costumes again. Do you think I’m MacKenzie Mauzy’s understudy? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not the best of times nor the worst of times, so stuff your mouth with something that hasn’t been double-deep-fried in yesterday’s grease.”

But Kurt didn’t say anything at all.

“C-Can I talk to you?” Blaine asked, hands flat on his thighs, eyes on Kurt.

Kurt took a deep breath and said, “Sure.”

Blaine grabbed both their trays and dumped the contents.

In the hallway, Blaine looked up at Kurt, waiting for him to say something.

“Not here,” Kurt said, grabbing his hand and leading them to the April Rhodes Civic Pavilion, which was guaranteed to be empty.

On the stage, Blaine looked over the empty seats and the abandoned instruments. This wasn’t an impromptu song number, then. He’d sort of expected that Kurt was singing some sort of break-up song, or a song about being scorned, or…. But this was cool too. Maybe they should talk more, instead of just singing everything.

“Kurt…Let me first say that I’m so sorry about what happened Friday. You were right. Our first time shouldn’t be like that, and I was drunk, and I am so, so sorry,” he said, looking up into Kurt’s eyes.

Kurt, pale and ethereal like always, just looked at him. Just looked. Blaine shifted under his gaze, as if Kurt was looking deep inside of him.

“I…,” Kurt began, trailing off. He looked off into the empty audience seats and turned away a bit.

“Kurt,” Blaine said, voice high, half prepared to break. He followed his movement.

“I forgive you,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

“What is it?” Blaine asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I…,” Kurt trailed off, still looking at the empty seats. He shook his head and then looked at Blaine as if waiting for…something.

“I love you,” Blaine said, almost pleading.

“I love you so much,” Kurt replied, some unnamed emotion in his throat. He took Blaine’s hand and stared into his eyes, searching, but for what Blaine didn’t know.

Kurt was always intense, he told himself. He always felt so strongly.

“Sebastian means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing,” Blaine insisted.

“I love you so much,” Kurt repeated, near breathless, “So, so much.”

The bell rang, and they didn’t move for a second. Kurt kept a grip on Blaine’s hand, and Blaine didn’t dare leave Kurt, not again. But Kurt eventually let him go, and Blaine watched him leave.

Later that day, Kurt left before Blaine. He didn’t realize until after he texted Tina a few hours later that Kurt must have walked out of school just after talking to him, skipping all of his afternoon classes.

* * *

“Finn told me that you’ve never used condoms.”

“What the fuck?” Puck said, whipping around in the locker room, half-naked. He grabbed his t-shirt and put it on so fast he didn’t even notice it was backwards. “Why would he be talking about _that_ with _you_ of all people?”

“He asked me for condom advice after your failure to advise him in one of our lady chats.”

“Lady chats?” he repeated mockingly with a raised brow, imagining Hummel spinning Finn around like a ballerina and painting his face with glitter while they talked about makeup and hot boys. Probably himself—Hummel had to totally dig his guns. All the girls do, and Hummel’s practically a girl himself. 

“That doesn’t matter,” Hummel said quickly, turning to one of the locker room mirrors and pulling out a travel-size aerosol can kind of like one of the ones he stole from his sister to set trashcans on fires. Hummel sprayed it all over his hair. Puck coughed hard. _WTF, Hummel! What is this fairy shit? Biological warfare?!_

“Regardless,” Hummel said, raising a brow at his coughing fit, “Do you get tested regularly?”

 _Like, in math and shit?_ “What do ya mean?”

“Tested,” Hummel repeated slowly. Puck bristled, because Hummel was prone to treating them all like idiots, and he was fucking sick of it. He pointedly cracked his knuckles. Hummel mimed a gag at the sound and then cocked his head, “Really, Puck? I know you’re a horndog waiting to be neutered for your health but have you really never been tested?”

“Tested on what?”

Hummel rolled his eyes with a prissy huff. He cocked a hip like Quinn used to do as HBIC, and said, “Have you been tested _for_ STDs?”

“The fuck?”

“STDs,” Hummel repeated like Puck was stupid.

Is this like the “My-mom-has-prostate cancer” shit all over again? “No?”

“Oh my god, Puck. You’ve slept with all the women in this town between the ages of fourteen and forty and you’ve never been tested for STDs?!”

That’s not fair, Puck thought. It was closer to half the women between sixteen and thirty-six.

“Why would I get tested?”

“Do you even know what an STD _is_?” Hummel said, eyes wide and horrified like that fun time after Puck hit him with the first pee balloon.

“Yes,” Puck lied. After a moment of Hummel’s crossed arms, disbelieving glare, and tapping foot, he corrected himself, “Not really.”

“HIV, herpes, chlamydia…?” Hummel asked, shaking his head, “Any of this ringing a bell? I know public school education is trash but we both had the same paltry sexual education.”

“Isn’t HIV some sort of gay shit?” Puck scoffed. “I know I’m hotter than your boy, and you got a mouth made for sucking dick, but I ain’t gay.”

“One, your sexuality is honestly debatable considering how you act around Sam. Two, HIV does not affect gay men more than straight men anymore. You’re actually considerably more at risk than me, especially considering the sheer amount of women you’ve slept with, including women like _Santana_ and Brittany who are… free with their affections.”

“You calling them sluts?” Puck asked, half-amused, and half-offended on their behalf.

“That doesn’t matter!” Hummel said, voice shrill, “You could literally _die_ from some STDs and your dick could fall off!”

“That is not true,” Puck said, lying out of his ass because he had absolutely no idea. He shifted awkwardly.

Hummel rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna take you to be tested for STDs.”

“What the fuck?!”

“I may not like you,” Hummel hissed, “But you’re my brother’s best friend and I’m not letting you die, because that would make him even more intolerable to live with, and he wore the same underwear _four days in a row_ more than once.”

Kurt made a grab for his wrist, but he jerked his hand out of the way.

“Really, Puck?” Hummel asked, arms crossed again and hip cocked _like a fucking bitch_ , “If anyone’s contagious, it’s you. Besides, believing your crush had cooties when out of style when we were both six.”

“I bet you just want a peak at my dick!”

“Not when I know you don’t wrap it up!” Hummel snapped, “And when the warts on your balls burst open, I’m sure not a single self-respecting woman on this planet will be willing to suck you off.” Hummel grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the locker room. Puck almost fell over his feet, jerked along like that.

Maybe it’d be best to just give in to the fairy’s insanity, he decided as if he didn’t decide to go with him all on his own.

_Damn, Hummel has some muscle on him. When the fuck did you grow up?_

_…it’s kinda hot._

* * *

 

“Why the fuck are we driving over an hour away for this shit?”

Hummel rolled his eyes and said, “You want to be seen doing this by people you know? Someone you’ve probably had sex with? Maybe the nurses who looked over Quinn our sophomore year?”

Puck slouched in his seat. Barely five minutes in, Puck was fidgeting. He couldn’t stand the silence. “Mind if I smoke?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Hummel snapped.

“Too bad,” Puck said, already pulling a baggy and lighter out of his pocket.

“ _Really_?!” Hummel squealed. Damn, his voice could go high enough to burst ear drums.

“Yup.”

“For God’s sake, Puck! Not in my car!”

But by then, it was already lit and Puck had taken a long drag and was blowing it right into Hummel’s girly face. Hummel started coughing hard, but held a red-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Oh yeah, Puck thought, if Hummel crashed, they’d probably die. Then again this car was _huge_. Bigger than he thought a chick-with-a-dick like Hummel would have. Maybe he was compensating for something _?_ He laughed. “Chill out, dude. You’re ruining my buzz.”

“My _car_ , Puck! This is my car!”

“Have a hit,” Puck offered, feeling rather gracious.

“If we get pulled over, I’m going to lose my license and go to jail because of you!”

“Jus’ don’t get pulled over,” Puck huffed, shoving the joint in Hummel’s face, “Besides, Ohio’s possession penalties are one of the most lenient in the whole country if you ain’t selling it and you ain’t growing it. Besides, I’m sure you’d be into it. You’ve always seemed like someone who needs to relax.”

“Cheezus, Puck!”

Puck forced it into his face until Hummel took it and took a drag. He coughed almost immediately.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Puck told him, “Take a breath, hold it in your mouth for a bit for it to cool off, then breath it in. Hold it again and then blow out. Try again.”

“This is stupid,” Hummel informed him, “What about your voice?”

 _Yeah, yeah, yeah, bitch. You’re still taking the hit_. Hummel took another drag, and while his face turned red, he didn’t cough again. He blew out a steady white stream of smoke and waved a hand in front of his face to disperse it.

“Good?” Puck asked, smirking.

“Doesn’t feel like anything at all,” Hummel said, blank faced. “You sure you got marijuana and not oregano?”

“Got it from Ryerson. He grows it himself!”

“Been to his basement after you cleaned his pool?”

“Mr. Ryerson doesn’t have a pool,” Puck told him, wondering why he’d asked. After a second: “Oh, fuck no, Hummel! All the V for me, not the D!”

“Uh huh.”

Puck took the joint back and took another drag, puffing circles into Hummel’s face. Hummel pointedly pressed a button that rolled down Puck’s window. The third time Puck did it instead of using the window, Hummel commented, “Do you want me to remark on how homoerotic it is to suck on a phallic shape and then blow?”

Puck sputtered on the joint and then laughed in shock.

They went through two joints by the time they were just over three quarters of the way there. Puck had relaxed entirely and was enjoying the green scenery on the grey sky. It was really a beautiful day, and the wind slapping the windowsill felt great against his skin. 

“You should be feeling a little buzzed by now,” Puck told him, “Calm or tired or happy, ya know?”

Hummel just nodded, pink-cheeked. “Ar-are we gonna do a third one?”

“No,” Puck laughed, “That’s like getting wasted compared to just tipsy. Right now we’re kind of tipsy, but like the weed version of tipsy.”

“How does it feel for you?”

Puck shrugged, getting comfortable in Kurt’s sweet, awesome ride. “Jus’ kind of nice, ya know?”

Kurt didn’t say anything for a while.

At the clinic, Kurt pulled into a parking space and they both headed to the door.

It was a normal looking doctor’s office, Puck thought with his buzz tapering off. White and green with a bunch of pamphlets and a couple of fishbowls filled with candies. He swiped one and opened it, ready for the sweet, sweet flavored sugar, but it tasted like chewy rubber. Hummel gave him a truly brilliant horrified face as Puck made a face at the horrible rubbery-and-maybe-kind-of-fruity taste and tossed it into one of the flowerpots.

The receptionist—was she a nurse?—was not hot enough to arouse Puckasaurus immediately, but it's been awhile. Harder for the MILFs of Lima to explain to their husbands why they're hiring a poolboy in late October. The receptionist was a redhead who was a little plumper than he liked, but with extra plump came large lady lumps, and redheads were hot and spicy in bed. Puck gave her the patented panty-dropping-grin and said, “Hey there, beautiful.”

He heard Hummel scoff beside him, and she gave him a harsh look. Ooh, hard to get! He liked it.

He went to lean on the high countertop, to get a look down her shirt and to show off his muscles, but Hummel walked around him and said, “We’re here to see a doctor, or a nurse, maybe.”

“Separately,” Puck added, grinning at the receptionist, “I’m all about the ladies.”

“Mhmm.” She pushed two clipboards with paper on it across the counter and said, “Today’s a slow day, so there won’t be much of a wait.” It was a Monday in the middle of the afternoon, after all. When Puck skipped he usually went some place cooler than this—pretending he was a homeless man at the gas station to score free booze, hanging around the one titty bar called Lust in the backwoods, playing video games naked in his room without his mom coming in yelling about property or propriety or something—but Hummel was kind of scary in that bitchy, pinched way Quinn was, and if this was so important for Hummel to get his panties so knotted up his ass to drag them both out of school in the middle of the day, he might as well come along for the ride.

Mmm, riding. He loved it when Mrs. Rochester rode him. Or Mrs. Adams. Or maybe Mrs. Rodriguez down in Lima Heights Adjacent.

“Puck,” Hummel said, “You’re not picking up women who know you’re here to be tested for diseases. Unlike the Desperate Housewives of Lima, these women have standards.”

The receptionist bit back a laugh and Puck shot Hummel a look. Puck decided he was never sharing his reef with this bitch ever again. Fucking a-hole.

“This better not cost me anything,” Puck told him as they sat down.

“Unlike you, I treat my dates.”

“This ain’t a date!”

“Fill out your paperwork.”

Puck scoffed and did so. It asked a bunch of normal boring shit like his name and contact details. He penciled out with a grin that his name was Artie Fischel and he lived on Drury Lane.—“You’re a child,” Hummel remarked over his shoulder, “An overgrown child who still draws on wall in crayon, and takes off his diaper three times a day, thinking he’s clever.” Puck replied without missing a beat, “The teacher will fail you if she catches you looking at other kids’ papers.”—Then the form asked why he was here. _This gay kid told me that since I don’t wrap it up my junk will fall off._ It had a check box of symptoms, but by then Puck was bored.

He grabbed the clipboard out of Hummel’s hand, ignoring his exclamation, and brought them back up to his mark-uh-the-receptionist. “Hey, baby,” he grinned. He leaned in conspiratorially, “The candy out there? It’s kind of gone bad. Have something sweeter for me?”

She gave him a shocked look. “That’s…not candy. Those bowls are full of free condoms.”

Puck stared at her. He turned on his heel and high-tailed it back to Hummel, who was laughing under his breath.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll bash your brains in and the judge will say it was justifiable homicide and not a hate crime.”

Eventually some guy came out and called for Artie Fischel. He paused after saying it and then frowned. Puck crowed in success and say, “That’s me!”

He followed the guy back, gleefully ignoring his annoyed look.

He barely even heard Hummel say to the receptionist, “I’m so sorry. He’s developmentally stunted. This is why you don’t drink when you’re pregnant. It’s a serious problem in this day and age.”

* * *

Eventually a woman came out for Kurt. He tried not to remember how he spent Saturday, but failed.

“Alright, Mr. Hummel, my name is Kathie Griff and I’ll be your nurse practitioner for today,” the woman said cheerfully. She was brown, just barely darker than Santana, and had long black hair. “Take a seat for me.”

Kurt sat on the examination table—it was green this time, not blue like the one in the ER, and her scrubs were green not pink like Nurse Rosie's. The only thing keeping his heart rate down was Puckerman's marijuana, even if he could feel the odd floating feeling—almost like when he lays in Blaine's pool on a cloudy day, just drifting with Blaine just smiling at him—wearing off bit by bit. 

She pulled up an IKEA swivel chair and smiled brightly at him, “Can you tell me why you’re here today?”

“I need,” he paused trying to find the words, “…prophylaxis.”

“Do you mean PEP? The post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV?”

He nodded.

“How long ago were you exposed to HIV?”

“Friday,” he whispered.

“Cutting it close,” she said, still smiling, pulling out a prescription pad, “It’s most effective the sooner you get it, but you’re still in the 72-hour period that it will work best. I’m glad you came as soon as you could.”

“I…,” he trailed off, eyes on the ground.

“Can you describe your last sexual experience? The type of sexual contact or whether condoms were used? I can tell you how necessary PEP is for you, depending on what took place.”

“Nope.” He laughed nervously. “I was… assaulted on Friday night. I technically have enough for three more days. The ER gave me some when I came on Saturday.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smile gone. She rolled across the room and pulled some pamphlets from a drawer. “Here are some resources for you.”

“Resources?”

“Hotlines, counseling services, support gro—.”

“I don’t want any of that,” Kurt said firmly. “I just want to forget it happened, and this is all part of forgetting it happened.”

“Alright,” she said. “But how about you take them anyway, just in case you need some ways to help you forget?”

“Fine,” he whispered. He took them and stuffed them in his bag.

“Do you have any sexual partners, anonymous or otherwise?”

“I have a boyfriend.” His phone vibrated in his pocket. “There’s no one else. Not for either of us. Except for… this.” He tried to hold onto the floating feeling, tried to keep the panic and anger and hatred underneath the chlorinated water, but it kept dripping away.

“Do you want to be tested for STIs right now?” Kathie asked gently.

“It’s too soon for them to come, right?”

“Yes, but most STIs are symptomless. Did the ER proscribe preemptive antibiotics?”

Kurt nodded.

“That’s good,” she said. “You can come back in three months to be tested for HIV and the other STIs. I think it’s easier to get them done all at once. Are you and your boyfriend sexually active?”

“Not yet,” Kurt said, eyes on the ground.

After a brief second, Kathie said, “While on PEP, you cannot have sex without protection, if you and your partner decide to become sexually active.”

“What am I supposed to tell him?” Kurt asked.

“About the sexual assault?”

“No,” Kurt said, shaking his head furiously, “About the…. I don’t think either of us expected to use….”

“Well, there’s a bunch of different ways to have sex,” Kathie said, leaning in slightly, so she could catch Kurt's eyes before he could look at the floor again. Some strands from her ponytail fell over her shoulder.

Kurt had hidden away the pamphlets his dad had gotten him, a little too embarrassed to look at them. He flushed and said, “Isn’t it just…?” he made a crude gesture, unable to say the words.

She smiled and said, “No, it’s not just penetrative sex. There’s outercourse, like mutual masturbation and manual stimulation of the penis and scrotum, and oral manipulation, and so on.”

It was the least sexy description of sex he’d ever heard—including all of the conversations at Finn's and Sam's "bro nights" with Puck, where vomiting and fromage were explicitly involved—but Kurt was still redder than a stovetop Finn had left on for almost an hour.

“I can give you a pamphlet?”

“No, thank you, I get your point,” he rushed out. He took a deep breath. “What could we do without condoms?”

“Outercourse is the safest form of sexual contact without condoms—that would be grinding or frottage, heavy petting and mutual masturbation, erotic massages, intercrural sex and intergluteal sex.”

“…what are…?” he tried to force out, “What are the last two?”

She explained rather bluntly and Kurt felt like dissolving straight through the floor. He stared at the tiles and counted them in segments of seven.  _One, two, three..._.

“And what about…?” he paused again, gathering the vestiges of his courage as he got to the forty-ninth tile. His phone vibrated again in his pocket, and he pretended Blaine was next to him, tapping out a beat on his leg slowly towards Kurt's hand in a not-so-sneaky sneak attack of affection. “And what about fellatio? Can we do that without condoms?” That seemed like the cleanest... option. Nothing had to go anywhere, nothing had to be cleaned up, and Kurt was rather sick of seeing anything like....

She frowned. “As a nurse, I think you should both use condoms for that all the time. But if you are both sexually fidelitous, for the rest of the month you can fellate your partner, but I would strongly, strongly recommend that if he fellates you that you use condoms, in case the PEP fails or you miss a dose. Missing a dose even once can put you in jeopardy of seroconversion.”

“And what if I’m positive?” His eyes fell to the floor again. He picked up from the forty-ninth tile and continued counting, pausing every seventh one. 

“We’ve come a long way from the days of _Rent_ —have you seen _Rent_? Great!—You can live a long, healthy, happy life, even if you are HIV-positive.”

“And Blaine?"

“Serodiscordant couples—couples of mixed HIV status—can be happy and healthy together, without the positive partner infecting the other. Is that all?”

He nodded.

“Make sure to make an appointment with Irena up front for three months from now to be tested! And take some free condoms just in case!”

* * *

Back in the waiting room, Puck and Kurt arrived roughly at the same time. Kurt paid for both of them, carefully hiding the bill from Puck—it was $200 for Puck, for the full panel, and it was $50 for Kurt given his proof of insurance. Then Kurt bullied Puck into making an appointment at the same time as Kurt’s for three months from then. 

When they got to the car, Puck grabbed his wrist in a bruising grip and hissed, “They put a q-tip up my dick! _Up my_ _dick_ , Hummel! And then they forced one down my throat! And then they stabbed me with _two_ needles—Fucking two!—and made me pee in a cup!”

“And are you diseased?” Hummel asked bluntly, ripping his arm away, "I need to know whether or not to cancel the vet appointment for euthanization."

“The quick tests for some of them came back negative, but I got to go get meds from CVS. You better be fronting the bill for that, too. Worst date ever, Hummel. I can’t believe you got that hobbit to stick around so long if you treat all your girlfriends like this.”

Hummel stiffened in the seat next to him, but Puck didn’t really care why.

“I’m going to CVS, too. Given how long the drive is, we shouldn’t have to wait too long.”

After fifteen long terse moments of Puck fidgeting and muttering about his dick, Puck finally said, “Come on. Out with it.”

Hummel made an inquisitive hum.

“Just say it,” Puck said irritably.

“I honestly have no idea what you’re getting at, given your English is heavily accented by your bigotry, ignorance and idiocy.”

“You told me so,” Puck spat out, “You were right. My junk could’ve fallen off.”

“I was enjoying my victory rather graciously in silence, but if you insist. This is literal proof that I am always right and far better than you in all ways.”

“Shut up and return to your gratefulness.”

“Graciousness,” Hummel corrected, smirking. 

After another twenty or so minutes, Puck spoke, unable to stand the silence and boredom, “I get why you got the STD test with me the first time, Hummel, but why’re you getting it again?”

“I know you won’t go unless I drag you there.”

_Oh Hummel, I am a professional bullshitter. I made it through three years of math without attending once, and I still got a C. Don't play the player, son._

“Yeah, but that don’t mean you have to get the test for yourself. You could, I dunno, sit in the waiting room reading wedding magazines or whatever it is you do.”

“It’s good to get in the habit of going every three months as a sexually active teen.”

“Yeah, I guess, but who else are you having sex with? It’s just you and your boy, and I know you ain’t cheating on your boy.”

Hummel bit his lip and looked a little too pointedly at the road, and Puck stared, bug-eyed.  “Holy shit, you’re cheating on your boy!”

“No!”

“I mean, no judgement here,” Puck said, gesturing to himself with a forced half-smile, “I’ve certainly cheated with enough women to know it’s not exactly that simple—”

“I’ve never cheated on Blaine,” Kurt hissed, getting right in Puck’s face. It was kind of cute, kind of like a Doberman puppy, something so small and helpless trying to be tough and badass.

“He cheat on you?” Puck asked with a wary, sideways look, “Catch his _metrese_?”

Kurt shook his head, slumping back in his chair.

“Doing drugs?” Puck prodded, “That sexy nurse said drugs could—”

Kurt just shook his head. “Just fuck off.”

“Ooh, big words,” Puck scoffed. He frowned, looking out the window. 

* * *

Back at home, Kurt groaned, dropping his bag, sliding against the inside of the door. The price of the meds was horrific. Since Puck didn't have proof insurance, his meds cost a few hundred dollars and while Kurt's were meant to be covered, it still cost him upwards of $700. Outside of his bargaining, painstaking stitch-by-stitch recreations, weaseling and occasional high-way-robbery of housewives, and his lack of qualms about reselling old pieces at marked-up prices, the price of the few genuine in-season fashion products he had almost broke his savings more than once. Now spending this much on a month worth of his medications, not to mention what the ER visit will cost, and the STD tests for the next six months  _at least_.... He sighed.

He checked his messages, most of which were from Blaine. He deleted all those that weren’t from him. Blaine was finally texting him again about a bunch of random things he was too excited not to share with Kurt. After a few months of contemplation, he realized that Blaine fit perfectly into his type of man, which had nothing to do with appearance and everything to deal with how much of a goober he was. Finn the dope, Sam the dweeb, and now Blaine the sugar-high hyper-active puppy. 

He read, scrolling through: 

 _1:19 PM_ : [image227.jpg]  
_1:19 PM_ : Look at Rikki Martinez’s new sweater!  
_1:20 PM:_ She has so much potential but she needs to stop with the straight leg jeans from Target. Just no.  
  
_2:27 PM:_ O my god, Jacob’s sister had her baby and it’s so cute! ~Blaine  
_2:27 PM_ : [image228.jpg]

His smile dropped.   
  
_2:38 PM_ : Tina told me you weren’t in class?? ~Blaine  
_2:38 PM_ : Are you OK? ~Blaine  
_2:39 PM_ : Kurt! Are you OK? ~Blaine  
  
_3:01 PM:_ Are you mad at me? Did something happen? ~Blaine  
  
_3:03 PM:_ I’m sorry ~Blaine  
  
_3:18 PM:_ You haven’t read any of my texts unless ou turnt off read reciepts ~Blaine  
_3:20 PM:_ *you *turned *receipts

Kurt swallowed hard. It was closer to five now, and he was clutching his new white paper bag of PEP. The crinkling bothered him so he shoved it in his bag with the crumpled pamphlets Kathie forced on him. He tapped _Call_.

“Are you okay?” Blaine asked worriedly.

“I just saw your texts now. I was driving.”

“Where are you? You skipped school? Did something happen? Is your dad oka—?”

“Blaine,” Kurt said, “Calm down. I just needed to go.”

“Was there a sale at Vienna’s? Why didn’t you take me with you?”

“No, no there was no sale. I just…,” Kurt trailed off, thinking about the sterile exam room, Kathie’s plain green scrubs, the loud, too loud pharmacy bag and laminated pamphlets in his satchel. “Today’s been hard.”

“Are you home? Do you need me to come over? I know your dad is canvassing the town tonight. I don’t want you to be alone.”

His dad _was_ out, though he was still giving Kurt the stony silent treatment over Kurt's "unacceptable behavior." He'd probably be mad when he got the call that Kurt had skipped school. Kurt bit his lip and closed his eyes, lighting tapping his head against the wood of the door behind him. After half a second, he realized there was a pattern to the tapping. Four taps, one pause, one breath, four taps....

“Kurt?”

“Yeah,” he said, voice wavering, blinking furiously wondering how an eyelash had possibly fallen into his eyes, head stilling on the wood, “Yeah, you should come over. I feel like I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Blaine didn’t say anything about how that didn’t make any sense. They’d only seen each other a few hours ago, after all. Blaine was so perfect, so, so perfect. Kurt grabbed his bag and headed up stairs to fix his hair and hide what he’d gotten.

The vicious part of him hissed,  _If you're positive, how can you expect to hide this from Blaine? Magic and glitter?_

* * *

Each day carried on much the same—with Kurt’s uncharacteristic quietness, and Blaine’s growing worry—even on dress rehearsal at Glee on Wednesday.

Kurt fluttered about the stage, pinning costumes and stitching new lines in the Goodwill fabric after Artie kept shouting that everything was all wrong. When Kurt got to Blaine, Blaine caught his eyes and grinned, flicking a look at Artie and then rolling his eyes around before crossing them. Kurt laughed under his breath.

Blaine grinned wider. _Success!_

Kurt stood. He came over to Blaine and accepted Blaine’s very quick kiss on the cheek, tugging on Blaine’s yellow cardigan for Tony and checking the buttons.

“You’re quiet,” Blaine said.

Kurt sighed. “Don’t have much to say.”

“Are you…,” he paused.

“No,” Kurt said, “I’m not mad at you. I’m just weird. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is it the play?”

Kurt raised a brow and said, “Don’t forget to use blush tomorrow night. You’ll look half dead under the lights. Stage lights are unforgiving.”

Was that why Kurt seemed so much paler than usual?

Blaine frowned as Kurt moved on to check the lace on Rachel’s dress. He watched Kurt frown and rip the lace off the bottom with a jerking motion. Rachel gasped and jerked away, but Kurt kept at it until it was completely off. Rachel frowned down at him and then looked over at Blaine. She mouthed exaggeratedly. Blaine didn’t understand and mouthed back _What?_ She rolled her eyes and repeated the motions even slower: _What’s wrong with Kurt?_ He shrugged and looked back at Kurt.

* * *

Will watched the dress rehearsal from backstage. He slowly approached Kurt and made sure Kurt could see him before he said, “How’ve you been?”

“I found my vest in my backseat,” Kurt said quietly, “It wasn’t taken after all.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Will said, forcing a smile, “I know how you are about your clothes.”

“I burnt it,” Kurt said, eyes on the ground, “I couldn’t stand looking at it.”

“How’ve you been sleeping?” Will asked. He’s googled common reactions of rape victims—survivors, he corrected himself. You’re supposed to call them survivors—and nightmares and insomnia seemed common enough.

Kurt flicked a look at Will. “Mr. Schue, I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You think you want to tell your dad, maybe, about what's goin' on?"

“Absolutely not,” Kurt said, spinning away from Will and sitting at one of the sewing machines, sewing a pink ribbon onto one of the chorus Sharks girls’ dresses.

Will frowned and awkwardly pulled a crumpled set of pamphlets he’d filched from Emma’s office out of his jacket pocket and tried to sneakily hand to Kurt, looking around to see if anyone was watching this exchange. Kurt glared up at him, as he slid the dress under the pistoning needle. “Those better not be what I think they are or so help me I will break into your house and key every single one of your 80s records. It’d expand your musical horizons, clear the gene pool for all living music, and make those songs sound better.”

“There’s some hotlines in there, too,” Will said, forcing the pamphlets forwards.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kurt hissed, furiously looking around.

Will looked around, too, to see if any of the stagehands were paying attention to their conversation.

Kurt continued fast, voice dripping in contempt, “What’ll they say? ‘Oh _ma’am_ , here’s a bunch of stupid support groups to talk about what happened to you! Just talk about it, that’ll surely make it all better, even though it does nothing at all! And you’re not alone, and it’s not your fault, _ma’am_!’ And I’ll say ‘Actually, I’m a guy,’ and they’ll tell me to shut up and to stop lying because this doesn’t happen to guys, because guess what, Mr. Schue? This _doesn’t_ happen to other gu—ys!” He squealed and Will gasped as Kurt jerked his hand away from the sewing machine, clutching his fist to his chest.

* * *

The whole stage staggered at the high-pitched screech. The music cut off from the dress rehearsal as Blaine shot across the stage, running behind the curtain.

“Kurt!” Blaine shouted, rushing to see Kurt breathing hard, hand clutched to his chest, eyes wide, with Mr. Schue hovering around. Blaine caught snapshots of the scene—a dark-pink dress tangling underneath the sewing machine needle, a tottered stool, a couple of crumpled papers underneath the table, Kurt staring wide-eyed at the table, fist clutched to his chest, Mr. Schue panicking beside him. Blaine rushed to his side, grabbed Kurt’s bicep and pulled his fist away from his chest to see what happened.

“I-I-I just caught my hand in the needle,” Kurt stuttered, shocked. “That hasn’t happened in years.”

Blaine peered at Kurt’s shaking fingers, and words caught in his throat. His manicured nail was shattered, half-hanging off his fingertip, and the skin to the side of the nail was just a bloody, torn mess. Kurt was breathing hard into Blaine’s neck, eyes wide and wet.

“Should we go to hospital?!” Blaine asked, staring at Kurt’s wet eyes and at Mr. Schue’s wide-eyed, dumbfounded face.

“Oh my god!” Rachel exclaimed, reaching them.

The rest of the actors and actresses came in closer and Mr. Schue swept around, “Guys, give us some room.”

“I’m taking you to hospital!” Blaine said, already rushing to Kurt’s bag for his car keys.

But Kurt grabbed him with his good hand. “No hospitals.”

“But—”

“No,” Kurt insisted, “No hospitals!”

“Mr. Schue,” Blaine said, whipping around, “Tell Kurt we’re going to the hospital!”

Mr. Schue looked from Blaine, then to Kurt for a few tense seconds, then finally back to Blaine, saying, “It doesn’t look too serious. You said this has happened before?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, nodding, talking over Blaine’s protests to take him anyway, “I just wash it and bandage it. It takes forever to heal, but it didn’t hit any bone.” He swallowed and looked at Blaine, “I made it worse by ripping my hand away, that’s why it looks so bad. It’s really not that bad.”

“Your fingernail is wrecked!” Blaine shouted, “Clearly—”

“It’s all aesthetic,” Kurt replied, voice soft, soothing, “The ER can’t do anything for that.”

“You’re bleeding!”

“It’s a finger!” Kurt said firmly, “It’s not like I sewed through my arm. More importantly, I should check to see whether I got blood on the dress.”

“No!” Blaine said, turning to the others, “Rehearsal’s over. We’ll be fine tomorrow night. I’m taking Kurt home.”

“Blaine, I don’t think—”

“I’m sorry, Kurt, but you’re hurt and you’re _clearly_ not thinking clearly.”

* * *

“This is so unprofessional!” Artie said, frowning and rolling across the stage as Blaine shooed his boyfriend out the door. 

Rachel crossed her arms. “I rather agree.”

“Someone check the costume for damage. How badly did Kurt mess it up?” Artie ordered, face red.

“It looks fine. It’s not even stained.”

“Alright,” Artie said, looking around at the others, “What are you all looking at?! Go!”

Rachel stayed as everyone left the stage.

“You, too, Rachel! I don’t want to see any of you right now! How could Kurt mess up his one job?! Someone like him is meant to be good at sewing—”

Rachel left Artie to mutter to himself, moving backstage to remove her stage makeup. While passing Kurt’s sewing table she noticed a crumpled paper under the table.

Oh, it’s one of Miss. Pillsbury’s pamphlets! Those were always good for an uncomfortable laugh and for unconventionally good advice….

Rachel’s smile dripped right off her face.

Whose pamphlet was this?

She looked around the empty backstage area, as if it would tell her the answer. She looked back down at the pamphlet, searching.

At the very edge was a splattered bloodstain.

 _Kurt_.

* * *

“What’s wrong, bumblebee?” Avi asked her at dinner as she stared worriedly at her plate.

“Yes, darling, what’s wrong? Did they decide to double-cast that Mercedes with you after all?” Dad said.

“No,” she said quietly, staring at her virtually untouched kosher meat-substitute.

“You’re gonna get wrinkles if you keep your eyebrows pushed up against each other like that,” Dad said.

“Leroy!” Avi chastised.

“It’s true! How’s she supposed to be cast as a young ingenue until her sixties if she keeps looking like that all the time?”

“She doesn’t look like that all the time!” Avi shouted back.

“Dads,” she said. They both looked at her. “It’s my friend, Kurt. Something’s happened. Something bad.”

“Did he drop out of the show?” Avi asked, “Jeopardizing it?”

“No, nothing as serious as that, but…,” she trailed off. “I don’t know what to do.”

Both of them stared at her expectantly.

* * *

 “Is your hand okay?” Blaine asked him before the show Thursday.

“It’s fine,” Kurt said, smiling at him and bumping his shoulder with his own. “The show must go on. If Andy Karl can open _Groundhog Day_ three days after tearing his knee practically in half, I think I can play Officer Krupke with a broken nail.” Kurt laughed, high but nervous.

“Are you sure? We can still cancel the show—”

“Absolutely not. This is your night, and you are going to shine, because you’re a star,” Kurt said firmly.

Blaine stared at him, hazel eyes deep and earnest. Something seemed off about Kurt’s tone…but maybe that was normal now. Maybe Kurt’s voice was getting even lower? Blaine impressed on him, “You’re a star, too, you know.”

Kurt ducked his head. “Not like you. But you’ll shine bright enough for the both of us.”

“You know that’s not true,” Blaine protested, “You’re great at portraying emotion and you’re so authenti—”

The stage tech interrupted, “Blaine, five minutes!”

Kurt rubbed Blaine’s arm, and rearranged his yellow jacket collar, smoothed out his white shirt collar, and finally tightened his tie, wriggling it up until it rested right over that sensitive place where his collar bones met. Blaine relished Kurt’s brief touches, and tried not to think of how his mother used to do the same for his father before he left on business trips, back when they really were business trips rather than cleverly disguised ways to get away from his girly son. Blaine tried to push away the old insecurities. His father couldn’t think he was girly now, could he? He was playing Tony, a gang member. What’s more masculine than that? Maybe Bernardo, he thought to himself. Tony was an idealistic romantic kind of like Kurt, and Bernardo was… kind of like how Blaine used to feel about how he smoothed back his maternally-inherited curls with a few ounces of gel each morning. He regretted…. It’s too late to regret taking the role, and Puck is fantastic as Bernardo.

“Do I look like Cary Grant?” Blaine asked, smiling lightly up at Kurt.  

“Better.”

Blaine asked playfully, “Does that mean you’re my Randolph Scott?”

Kurt grabbed his tie and pulled him in close. Blaine relaxed into him. It was a soft-lipped, nearly-close-mouthed kiss, with a hint of tongue between them. Blaine loved the subtle hint of Kurt’s cologne—strong and sweet with a bite, like black cherries in ginger sauce—and he liked it even more when it clung to his hair gel, so he could walk around with Kurt's scent on his skin.

Kurt pulled back and whispered with a grin against Blaine’s lips, putting on a southern accent, “No matter what happens, don't break down in front of 'em. If you do, they'll take it wrong. Shame 'em.”

Blaine shivered. The corners of Kurt’s lips quirked and he squeezed Blaine’s waist just for a second before letting him go.

“Showtime,” Kurt breathed against Blaine’s ear, before pushing him towards the stage.

Kurt watched as scenes unfurled, waiting for his cue and watching Blaine in his element. There were only a couple places Kurt had ever seen Blaine entirely at peace—when performing and when alone with Kurt.

 _That’ll change, won’t it?_ Kurt’s mind whispered in his ear. _If you tell him, if he finds out what you did, what you let someone do to you…_. Shut up, he told that part of him. He knew Blaine loved him, and he knew enough about love, real, true love, that it wouldn’t change even after everything else had. _How can you be sure?_ his brain hissed. Kurt tapped his shoe with his baton six times, one for each separate season and then another two to emphasize the importance of the Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter seasons, the original two. Then he did it again for his other shoe. It distracted his brain from commenting about the scratchiness of the polyester costume on his skin—like cheap motel sheets—and the fact he was wearing three undershirts under his costume and four layers of foundation over his bruises which were that sickly green and yellow color now, and the poisonous, treacherous thought that he’d never be able to tell Blaine, ever, just in case Blaine might…. He tapped his shoes again, and then his elbows.

He looked through the opening between the curtains and the stage to peer at the audience, seeing how amazing Blaine was, some of them for the first time in their puny, narrow minds. He smiled and scanned the audience, wondering if maybe Blaine’s parents could make it. He had sent Mr. Anderson two separate invites, because he knew how much it would mean for Blaine for his dad to come, and he’d emailed Pamela, but he knew she’d never come if Mr. A—is that Sebastian?

In a group off to the left of the stage in a series of blue and red uniforms, there was that skinny, smirking, rodent face.

He blinked and heard in between the waves of blood rushing behind his eardrums:

 _“Rough night, babe?”_ a grizzled voice said through the drizzling rain, dreamlike and hazy in his thoughts.

He froze, staring at Sebastian who was watching Blaine in rapt attention. He felt his skin chill, and his pulse throb in his throat underneath his earlobes. His mouth opened a little, watching Sebastian lean back to say something to a prep school boy behind him, as if the world had slowed down to a frame by frame account. He felt the dry skin of his tongue touch the roof of his mouth like sandpaper. His collar felt too tight.

 _“And for Kurt, a Shirley Temple with extra cherries. I heard you’re the designated driver. Like all the time,”_ a boy sneered in the hot, claustrophobic bar before taking Blaine’s hand and spinning him about.

He blinked furiously, turning slowly to see Blaine leap and spin on the stage and land with a flourish. The music sounds warped in his years, each chord garbled in the rush of his blood, and somehow he can see, hear, feel the stage move underneath Blaine’s feet and rumble towards him. The whole Civic Pavilion falls away underneath his shoes. He feels the phantom touch of a hand on his waist, of a mouth on his shoulder. He watches the dimness of the backstage morph into the red-orange lighting of the bar. He feels dizzy, head spinning, eyes glazing. He turns his head, slowly, so slowly, and sees Sebastian, smirking, laughing. It felt like five thousand heartbeats drummed in his ears.

 _“Doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you_ ,” he overheard in line at their coffee shop, said by a boy to his Blaine, trying to take him away.

He remembers the parking lot from his dream, the way the cold water dripped on his burning skin. He remembers being alone, like he is backstage, because he’s not manly enough for the stage, no matter how strong he is, no matter what weapons he uses, no matter how hard he tried to pull away from the hand at his waist, from the mouth on his shoulder, from Sebastian’s mocking eyes across the bar. He feels stuck, feet sunk in quicksand—you’re not supposed to struggle if you’re stuck in quicksand, he remembered, you’ll just sink faster.

Like the wave at the beach, pulling back, back, back, to form a huge wave, like the heat of the Mohave desert as the sun rises, he waits, suspended in space, eyes on Sebastian, eyes on Blaine, eyes on nothing, deadened in the bar because his eyelids are too heavy to keep open. Something nameless rumbles in his chest, underneath each pulse of blood, humming under his nerves, under his whitening, tightening muscles clenched everywhere—to keep himself upright, to keep his head up, to keep his grip on his character’s baton.

 _“You don't know what's going on in this kid's head. You don't know what he's capable of,”_ he’d said so long ago, terrified in a principal’s office.

The tsunami crashed in his head, the heat pulsed in shimmery waves over the skin-peeling sand, and the rage erupts in his chest. He may not know much, but he knew Sebastian was there. He knew Sebastian watched. He knew Sebastian left him to die.

Kurt wanted to kill him.

He wanted to take his baton—a painted, repurposed bat he’d filched from the locker room—march up the stairs through the audience, crawl over the knees of all those Dalton boys and bash his head in. He wanted to grab him by his hair and drag him outside onto the pavement—how he might have been dragged. Wanted to kick him over and over and over and over again. He wanted to corner him after the show and wrap his fingers over Sebastian’s skinny, stubbly neck and shriek at him, to threaten him, to destroy him until Sebastian confesses everything he saw, everything he let happen to some boy he barely even knew for the sake of getting into a conquest’s pants, and then crush his larynx like a twisted bendy straw.

It was like falling in love, he thought. As easy as meeting Blaine’s eyes, as grabbing his hand, as following him to his fate. It was so easy to loathe Sebastian, to think of how easy it would be to….

“You’re on in five,” the stage tech said, tapping him, “You ready?”

Kurt blinked and relaxed his handle on the baton. He forced a smile and said, “I’ve always been ready.”

Sebastian had laughed at him, like Miss Pillsbury, Artie, Coach Beiste, and he was so sick of being laughed at.

* * *

Blaine grinned as Kurt took to the stage like a swan to the sky. He looks over the audience, failing to hide his gloating face as Kurt demanded attention—Kurt always demanded attention, and he deserved it more than anyone. He saw his friends, the Warblers—as good as his family before Kurt, before the functional dysfunctionality of the New Directions—and warmed, happy to see them. His breath stuttered a bit over Sebastian. 

He came after all. Blaine’s smile softened into nothing and he looked back at Kurt playing the cocky, racist cop.

Kurt made a great villain—in a play without villains only victims, Kurt still managed to show who the real evil was here. Their society, the uselessness of the police, the limitations on both the Sharks and the Jets ethnically and economically. Kurt embodied bitterness with a useless, unprotective, unproductive authority and how he bodily played with the Sharks as they snarked their way through “Gee, Officer Krupke!” Then again, Kurt could play any role, Blaine was sure. He could embody any emotion, bring depth to any plot, even one as tried and true and romantic as another Romeo and Juliet redux. He felt like a fraudulent Tony next to the depth Kurt had brought to such a minor character. Kurt deserved more than to be a minor, songless character. Let him sing.

They should go together for some community theater auditions, and next time, he promised himself, he wouldn’t let the casters bully him into taking Kurt’s role. In community theater, they wouldn’t be his friends or his teachers. They couldn’t touch him. They couldn’t touch _them_.

Sebastian might have tried, but Blaine knew better now. He realized how much was on the line. He’d thought before taking Sebastian up on his suggestion of a coffee date “What could it hurt?” but now he knew. He _knew_. It wasn’t work losing Kurt over, hurting Kurt over.

And Kurt was hurt, Blaine knew. While Kurt didn’t exist on the stage, only the eminent Officer Krupke, he could only hide himself in a role that he didn’t play every day. Kurt had been off all week and Blaine knew it was his fault. He hated Artie for making him feel like he had to pressure Kurt, hated Sebastian for inviting them to that bar, hated disappointing Kurt.

All he wanted was for Kurt to be proud of him, to be proud to be with him.

Now he knew that might be in jeopardy. Kurt was holding himself back, off stage. Pulling away.

He’d fix this, he swore to himself. The real question was how.

* * *

The play ended with a standing ovation. The whole cast came out to bow and accept the applause. Blaine was towards the middle with Rachel and Santana and Puck, and Kurt was towards the outskirts. When the stage darkened and the curtains closed, they all grinned to each other and broke off into pairs. Blaine smiled at Kurt but was pulled away by Rachel and Artie to talk over the play. Kurt waved and texted him that he’d come look for Blaine after.

Kurt got undressed in the bathroom and touched up his foundation even though none of the bruises were showing. He looked around and then pulled out his translucent powder and powdered his T-zone. He didn’t feel like standing up against judgement tonight. He was judging himself enough and surpressing enough disappointment and rage that he didn’t need any more.

He smiled at his reflection, wondering how obvious its fakeness was. Tonight, his dad and Carole were heading to Toledo, and he could go to Blaine’s for the night.

 _Can you do this?_ the treacherous, dangerous part of his mind asked. 

“I have to,” he told his reflection. He paused and rephrased, “I want to. It’s about love. It’s a gift.” This has nothing to do with what happened, he told himself. He was going to do this anyway. He wanted to be adventurous and interesting and for Blaine to want to rip his clothes off. He wanted to rip Blaine's clothes off. Or at least he used to. 

One of the pamphlets Kathie had given him talked about virginity, as a construct and how even if he’d internalized the concept, it was something to give, not something that could be taken from him. He didn’t really believe that. But he didn’t trust himself— ~~ _Sebastian_~~ —enough to keep what had happened away from Blaine.

He restyled his hair so it didn’t look completely flattened underneath Krupke’s hat.

He took his costume and baton back to the stage room, but on the way he ran right into the devil.

Sebastian sneered at Kurt, and said, “Look what we have here.”

All the words rose in Kurt’s throat, burning like vomit just waiting to spew.

But Sebastian beat him to the punch, quirking a brow. “How would Blaine feel about his ruby-shoed Dorothy taking it up with some rando? Guess you have to be desperate for any dick you get when you look like a cross-dressing Judy Garland and sound like retired Julie Andrews. God knows no one with standards would go for some _thing_ like yo—”

Quicker than a viper, quicker than thought, Kurt fisted the handle of his baton and clocked it against Sebastian’s skull. The second the hit struck, the reverberations and the shock dropped Sebastian and the baton straight the ground, and Kurt felt the bile in his throat surge a bit. Sebastian half-shrieked when it connected and Kurt heaved, wide-eyed, as the baton clattered against the floor. After a quarter second of terrified assessment, Kurt decided Sebastian wasn’t bleeding or unconscious, and he grabbed him by his stupid tie—a man possessed—and hissed, “You come near Blaine again and I’ll cut off your twinkle tube, bedazzle it so it glitters like all the faggy things you hate about yourself, and sell it to a pervert, you hairless flying monkey. Do. Not. Test. Me.”

He dropped his crinkled tie and Sebastian tried to scramble away as fast as he could.

The door to the stage room opened and Blaine gasped. He rushed over and Kurt just watched him.

“Oh my god, Sebastian, are you okay?” Blaine asked, across the hall.

“It was Azimio Adams,” Kurt heard himself say, like a dream, “The complete Neanderthal saw me talking to Sebastian and must’ve thought he was you because of the Dalton uniform. It was a complete hit and run! I’m so glad you weren’t hurt!” He turned to Sebastian and offered a limp wristed hand, “Are you alright, Sebastian? I can’t believe Azimio would just hit you like that. Steroids, I’ll tell you. Builds the muscles, bottles the brain, and shrinks the balls.”

“You’re madder than the hatter, Alice,” Sebastian bit, wobbling to his feet.

“Do you need a ride?” Blaine asked worriedly.

“Absolutely not,” Sebastian said, eyes flicking between Kurt and Blaine, and he rushed down the hall, stumbling slightly.

“Should we go after him?” Blaine asked worriedly,

“No,” Kurt said coolly, “He’s probably more shocked than hurt. I don’t think Azimio hit him that hard. You said Sebastian was from France? I don’t think he’s ever experienced All-American Homophobia before.”

Blaine frowned but after a moment he turned to Kurt. "Your hands are shaking!" Blaine said, grabbing his hands. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, Blaine," Kurt lied. His hands were shaking, and the hateful adrenaline rushing through his veins tapered off and he felt sick. He couldn't believe he'd done that to Sebastian. He couldn't believe he'd attacked him. He could still feel the phantom of the baton in his hand, feel that nauseating crack against Sebastian's head reverberating up his arm. _You could've killed killed him_ , the cruel part of his brain said. _What if you hurt Blaine next?_

"You don't look fine," Blaine said, worriedly. "I can't believe he'd just do that!" _Who?_ Kurt wondered. _Oh, Azimio_. "I'm so glad you weren't hurt!" 

"I'm fine," Kurt repeated. He clasped Blaine's hands, willing the shaking to disappear. “You were amazing on the stage tonight." He gave a humorous huff and looked upward, “Well, you’re always amazing, but especially tonight. You’re born for the stage.”

“Your Officer Krupke killed,” Blaine countered, “Everyone loved what you did with it. You really made it your own. Brought the house down!”

Kurt flipped his hair as much as he could when it was hairsprayed in place and said, “I always pull focus. Sorry,” after a second, “No, I’m not sorry.” He chuckled and Blaine stared up at him happily.

“Oh!” he said, “Um… Artie’s having an after party. At Breadstix. Would you accompany me?”

“I…sure,” Kurt said, “Just let me drop off my Krupke clothes.”

But on the way to Breadstix, Kurt closed his eyes and drew up the vestiges of the courage Blaine lent him like a little good-luck charm with his very presence and said, “Actually…I want to go to your house.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Blaine told him, voice quiet, “I didn’t mean to do what I did on Friday. You don’t have to… I know how important this is to you.”

“It is important to me,” Kurt said to the dark road in front of him, “That’s why I want to do it. I’ve thought about it, and I decided that I want to do this with you, because….” He trailed off. He thought of a bunch of ways to complete that: _I love you, because you’re mine, and because you mean everything to me. Because the best way for it to be perfect, is to do it with you, and I wish, wish, wish I’d just let us have done it in my backseat and take you home drunk again instead of what happened. Because I want to forget. Because I want to remember you and forget anything else that happened._

Instead he gave Blaine a smile. He didn’t try for sexy—Blaine had said he wasn't sexy, and Kurt believed him. Kurt always believed Blaine. Sometimes, Blaine was all he had to believe in. 

But during the forty-five minutes of playful conversation and the wonderful ease of just existing with Blaine, the confidence began to edge away again. He tried to tap the steering wheel in any of his favorite configurations; sevens, fours, twenty-threes. He tried to reorganize his hands around the wheel in all the positions of the clock. He tried to count the number of streetlights he passed, but he just couldn’t stave off the anxiety.

In Blaine’s room, when they both only have pajama bottoms and undershirts on, Kurt sits on the edge of Blaine’s bed. He tries to say something, anything, but what comes out instead is a whispered, “I don’t think I can do this.”

 _You are nothing but helpless aren’t you?_ His mind hissed at him. _You’re a damsel in distress. Might as well put on a dress and sing like the girl everyone has been telling you that you are all along. You should’ve tried out for Anita; you’d really relate to that character_ now _, wouldn’t you?_

Blaine sits next to him, bumping their shoulders together, staring at him worriedly, “You don’t have to do this you know. We can wait until you’re ready.”

“It’s…,” Kurt sighed, pressing a fist to his eyes, “It’s not that. Not really. I am ready.” _Liar_.

“Then what’s wrong?” Blaine asked, earnest hazel eyes peering up at Kurt’s. “We can work it out, I’m sure. You can tell me anything.”

“I don’t think we can work it out. There isn’t anything you can do.”

“Please, Kurt. Talk to me?”

“I…," _Something happened. Something horrible,_  Kurt didn't say. Instead he said, "I don’t want to talk about it.”

Blaine asked, jumping to one of his worse conclusions. “Was it Azimio? Did seeing him again bring up bad memories? Or Karofsky?” Blaine certainly had enough bad memories of his own to understand. Blaine couldn’t even imagine seeing one of those boys from the Sadies Hawkins Dance parking lot again, in a gay bar, acting like they could be friends, despite all the passed time, and horrific sexually-charged comments, and bruises, even if he'd allegedly reformed. Blaine never had seen proof of Dave’s reform, anyway, and he knew Kurt tended towards exaggeration and quick forgiveness. And then Azimio had to hit Sebastian tonight right in front of Kurt! That had to remind him of what happened with Karofsky.

Kurt scoffed, eyes moving up to the ceiling in disbelief. “No. It’s not Dave. I’ve hardly even thought about him since he’s transferred. I just….” He shook his head.

Blaine grabbed his hand, resting the intertwined pair on Kurt’s thigh. “Whatever happened, I’m here, okay? You don’t have to shut me out. Was it Sebastian?”

“I—not really. But that’s part of it,” Kurt said. He sighed and dragged his empty hand through his hair, remembering the baton and Sebastian's terrified eyes. “He makes me uncomfortable, but now I think the whole world is making my skin crawl.”

"You want to take a breather?” Blaine suggested, “If you want we can just cuddle. Put on a movie, or some crap television, or something?”

“Just give me a minute,” Kurt said, pressing a kiss to Blaine’s neck. Kurt stood and headed towards the bathroom.

He meant to go to the bathroom. He really, really did. But the bathroom was down the hall and passed Mr. and Mrs. Anderson’s bedroom, and through the open door he caught sight of a bottle in a basket. Pamela must’ve gotten it from one of their motel rooms and left it there on one of her endless trips in and out of the house.

An old, nasally soprano voice whispered in his ear, “A few swigs of that before school, and you'll have all the courage you need to be yourself.”

All the courage to be himself.

And then he heard Puck’s high baritone whisper, “You seem like someone who needs to relax.”

It’d be wonderful to relax.

Last time, he told himself, you just drank too much. The difference between just being tipsy and being wasted, right? Only a few sips.

He looked towards Blaine’s room cautiously and then pushed open the door as quickly as he could to minimize a squeak. He approached the bureau and the basket. He grabbed the bottle and easily opened it. He didn’t see a glass and cringed at what he was about to do as he brought the glass bottle to his bare, open mouth.

It was just cooler than lukewarm and it tasted like fizzy, sour cherries. It wasn’t really sweet at all. A part of him thought he didn’t deserve sweetness, and to drown that stupid thought out he took another sip. It didn’t burn like the Chablis in the aftertaste, it just seemed fruity. It was odd to taste the fruit but none of the sugar. He thought, blinking at the ceiling, that his hips would thank him for not consuming extra sugar. He took another two sips and then felt the buzz—that floating feeling, not really happy like Puck had thought or especially calm, but just floating through space, not anchored down by anything at all.

He bottled the wine and gently rested it back in its basket. He peered at his reflection in the mirror above the bureau and smiled. He checked his lips for any wine stains and then went back to Blaine.

“Alright,” Kurt said, smiling, “I’m ready.”

He knelt on the bed and crawled towards Blaine on his knees. Blaine smiled at him and curled a hand around the nape of his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. Blaine moaned into his mouth and Kurt arched his neck at the lovely vibrations against his lips, the heat from Blaine’s throat rolling like smoke down Kurt’s throat.

“How are we doing this?” Blaine asked, blinking up at him.

Kurt gently trailed a finger down his boyfriend’s chest until he reached the bottom edge of his undershirt and then pushed it up. He cocked his head, looking at the exposed dark hair wisped around his belly and darkening towards the top edge of Blaine’s pajama bottoms. He pushed the undershirt over Blaine’s head and then teased the edge of Blaine’s pajama bottoms down.

Kurt looked up at him underneath his lashes, smirking, cheeks flushed, and kissed Blaine down the center of his chest until he reached his prize. Blaine arched back, blinking, eyes-wide, mouth gaped slightly, reverent.

And Sting played in the background:

 _"_ _I walked across the city_  
_Because I couldn't stand your pity_  
_Big lie, small world_  
_It was a big lie, small world..."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Reference Notes**  
>  Boq is from _Wicked_. Blaine's internal Kurt remarks that he's not MacKenzie Mauzy's understudy. Mauzy played the Seamstress in Broadway's _Tale of Two Cities._ Andy Karl tore one of his anterior cruciate ligaments the Friday before Groundhog Day (the musical) aired and still went up opening night three days later, with a brace holding his knee together. Cary Grant is a famous actor who played a romantic leading man in the '50s and '60s. He had tan skin and gelled back black hair his whole career. He was rumored to have a sexual relationship with Randolph Scott, a tall leading man featuring in Westerns, since they lived together on and off for 12 years, though there is no actual evidence. What Kurt says to Blaine before he goes on, “No matter what happens…” is from _Ride Lonesome_ , a movie Randolph Scott acted in. Kurt's internal monologue remarks that he should have tried out for Anita. Anita, in WSS, is sexually harassed and in some versions actually sexually assaulted. 
> 
> **Research Notes**  
>  PEP—post-exposure prophylaxis, which Kurt was given after his potential exposure to HIV—should only be used in emergency situations, and is often proscribed after a sexual assault (esp. male on male). PrEP (pre-exposure) can be used in mixed-status couples, but cannot be the only source of infection prevention. PEP costs between $600 and $2500 (without insurance, and generally $50 in copays with insurance (that is, insurance that covers it. Not all plans are equal.)). If prescribed after a sexual assault, the survivor may be reimbursed for part or all of the cost, if they are willing to go through the hoops to get it (I’ll tell you right now, Kurt doesn’t even know he can do that, like so many people in this country). PEP involves two or three antiretrovirals that you take every day for 28 days (notably, occasionally the same medication poz people take). HIV can take up to five days to integrate with your bloodstream, so PEP is only useful within the first 72 hours. Like all things in this story, Kurt was lucky to be prescribed PEP at an ER—most have to go to a clinic, like Planned Parenthood, and often people don’t know to go there until it’s too late (though Kurt was quick thinking enough to go to PP almost immediately the following week that he would have been fine regardless). A SAFE kit can involve the first week’s worth of PEP, though this varies. Kurt is paying for the next three weeks. 
> 
> Planned Parenthood does offer STD tests, and several of them do give them to men (they are supposed to give education, services, care, treating and testing to _both sexes_ , but like all things this availability varies by location). One of my main goals of this story is to inform people about how things should go, optimally. There are other cheap/free clinics, localized to certain areas, but I would assume the procedures, availability, and practices of where I am and where Kurt is would differ. I decided to go with national organization for ease of my research, and because I (note author bias) would sooner go to a Planned Parenthood than anywhere else. The full panel where I am (which only tests for five STIs) costs $180-$200 without insurance (to my understanding; with coverage it varies). There are free clinics (fair warning: free days are often jam-packed with people who need the testing and treatment but honestly can’t afford it) and Planned Parenthood offers a sliding scale with proof of income. The vast majority of what Planned Parenthood provides has absolutely nothing to do with abortions, besides from preventing their necessity via education, contraception and medical care at little to no cost.
> 
>  _Metrese_ is a Yiddish word essentially meaning "mistress." There's a couple of others I thought about using, but I didn't think were easy enough to figure out if someone wanted to skip my outrageously long notes. 
> 
> **Canon Notes:**  
>  Puck doesn't use condoms. Kurt wanted to listen to Sting while losing his virginity. I do think Kurt has the potential to act the way I'm gradually portraying him - especially given some scenes in season 4 and 5, that I'm prepared to defend my decisions to the death.


	3. Led Up The Garden Path

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kurt and Blaine spend the weekend after West Side Story's opening night together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a very brief edit to the first chapter regarding Donna the victim's advocate after the police talk to Kurt (it doesn't affect the plot a huge amount, but accuracy is very important to me). This is a really difficult topic to find complete information on, and I absolutely appreciate any and every one that helps me keep this accurate. Thanks to _fuckedupisperfect_ for fact-checking me on victim advocacy, and thank you for doing the work you do.
> 
> This chapter was very hard to get out because frankly my writing was not following my outline and I was frustrated with myself and my writing. Believe it or not, this chapter was meant to introduce the overarching plot, a subplot, and half of 3x06. Instead we spent the weekend at Blaine's. Note: Blaine is a teenaged boy who thinks about sex. A lot. I don't really find what he recalls from Friday night that explicit, but I'm also aware that my measure for Mature vs. Explicit is off. Let me know if I should up the rating. 
> 
> Blaine sings the first verse and hook of the song "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers (the exact first minute). I hyperlinked the video in case you get freaked out by sudden html links (I promise it's not adware!). I imagined the beat of the original but Adam Levine's voice (Maroon 5's cover is slower and almost sadder, if you get what I mean, but the original was more upbeat, kind of like a Sublime song). I unfortunately lack the skill to mash up the original beat and Levine's voice myself with computer magic. (I imagined Levine's voice because he's a tenor like Blaine, unlike Bill, and I find it harder to transpose in my head).
> 
> Chapter title is derived from the idiom "lead up the garden path," meaning roughly for someone making another believe something that isn't true. 
> 
> Opening song is from _Next to Normal's_ "I've Been," sung by Dan, the husband of the main character. Closing song is "Secret," by Maroon 5.

"And every day this act we act gets more and more absurd.  
And all my fears just sit inside me, screaming to be heard.  
I know they won't, though, not a single word."  
-Dan, "I've Been," _Next to Normal_

* * *

 

Kurt jerks awake. He blinks up at the ceiling; his sweat pooled in the creases of his skin. He raises a hand to his neck, wiping away the sheen. His breathing calms some as his hand drops down to a fuzzy surface. Oh. Blaine. He runs his fingers through Blaine’s hair that he’s so rarely seen _au naturel_. It was such a different texture to Kurt’s own hair—coarse, fine, frizzy, thickly coiled but not really close to his scalp. Kurt always thought a little bit of product was great, but Blaine didn’t seem to believe in small amounts of gel, especially since he’s come to McKinley.

He peers down at him and only sees Blaine’s frizzy black mane and maybe his tan nose buried in his chest. He slowly grabs the end of one of his curls and pulls to its full uncoiled length, and he watches as it roughly bounces back into place. He huffed a laugh. Blaine groaned and nuzzled his cheek against Kurt’s undershirt. Blaine had been sleeping since just after Kurt made him shower after he had sex. Kurt, on the other hand, hadn’t been sleeping well at all. He’d barely gotten to sleep sometime after three, and by Blaine’s wall-clock it was barely six.

Once again, his thoughts drifted to Sebastian and what he did.

A part of him whispered _, You’re a monster. You’re out of control._

Leave me alone, he told it, blinking his eyes in time to the ticks of the second hand on the clock. Once twenty-eight seconds passed, he allowed himself to look at Blaine again. He hadn’t let Blaine reciprocate last night— even though he was valiantly fighting the endorphins to be a gentleman, Blaine looked very tempted to roll over and go to sleep after his second orgasm (that Kurt hurriedly gave him after the first). Kurt let him sleep, under the guise of the loving, ever-polite boyfriend.

_And it is a guise isn’t it?_ that cruel voice said, _You’re a liar, a cheat and a monster_.

Why did he even do this? he wondered. Why did he decide to go to Blaine’s house? It couldn’t undo what happened—Nothing happened, he insisted. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. It couldn’t fix him. He didn’t magically want sex more. He didn’t even really want it that much before Scandals. He would have been happy to just keep kissing Blaine, sometimes (especially) shirtless, and maybe introduce hands soon; mouths in a few months. But then Sebastian strolled up and tried to take Blaine away. He’s not a toy, he admonished himself, you can’t fight over him. You can’t stake a claim over him. _What are you, a dog marking your territory?_

Blaine’s a human. Blaine can make his own choices. But isn’t it better, he told himself, to let Blaine know he needn’t seek an outside party? Kurt _was_ willing. He _did_ want Blaine like _that_. He did want to make Blaine tremble and gasp and moan and pretty much pass out just like he did last night—and part of him thought he might want to do that to Blaine more, even more than he thought he would. It was always a delight to see Blaine, the prim, proper, polite candyman he was, out of control, stripped bare to his emotions, reduced to his body, trying to chase pleasure, but held down and bound by Kurt’s hands, chest, weight.

_That’s the cinch though,_ that voice said, _Out. Of. Control. We can’t do that, can we? We never could. Everyone always wants to take control of us, and we’re just too weak to take it back._

Until he did. Last night. In the hall. But that was losing control in and of itself, wasn’t it?

He could’ve killed Sebastian. He could’ve _killed_ someone. And for what? Sebastian had seen some guy… with Kurt, and didn’t do a thing. Sebastian was a slut, like Puckerman, and probably assumed Kurt was one, too—Rage roared in his chest, thinking of those policemen. _I am not a slut! I didn’t want it! I didn’t want him to touch me, bruise me, bite me, fuck me! How dare you suggest otherwise?!_ —After all, Sebastian’s definition of a relationship was half an hour of groping in a bathroom stall last cleaned before they were conceived.

“Were you drinking?” one of the cops had asked. When he’d said he didn’t know, they asked him, “Where were you at the time?” He thought he’d never forget how they looked at each other when he told him he was at Scandals, the only gay bar in Lima. He’d never forget how they looked at him. He’d never forget what they said about him, to his face. And when they’re that willing to throw a slushie in your face…. Things were always, always worse behind closed doors.

And the heart-thumping adrenaline, the feel of the baton, the wonderful outpouring of his rage—it was like what he’d read about the medieval period in Europe, the so-called doctors putting a leech on him to suck out his sickness. Sebastian’s skull sucked out all of Kurt’s rage like the vampire his teeth suggested he was (he definitely was European, given how bad they looked), leaving his heart to fill up with the short-lived confidence he needed. But the adrenaline wasn’t anything like Puckerman’s marijuana, or like Mr. Anderson’s and Pamela’s wine. It didn’t linger or wash the bad thoughts and memories away, even for a few hours. It just made him feel sick, not fuzzy or floaty.

“ _Rough night, babe?_ ” the dream from a few nights ago danced through his head.

Nothing happened, he told himself again, Nothing happened at all, and that’s the way it had to be. And so what if something happened, if Se— _someone_ saw and didn’t do anything? It was done. And nothing happened, because if something happened, Kurt couldn’t deal with it, not if he dealt with it in a way as crude and careless and thoughtless and horrific as violence instead of something useful like designing or writing.

Speaking of forgetting….

Had he remembered to take his pills last night? Had he even brought some to Blaine’s house?!

The cold sweat on his neck suddenly felt like slime

He dragged a hand to Blaine’s lovely bare chest—Kurt never thought he’d like body hair, but Blaine always surprised him—and tried to gently shuffle him off. Maybe he could just drive home and get a dose, and count out the pills a few times to see whether or not he’d missed one, and come back before Blaine even woke up…? Blaine’s bare arm that was flung over Kurt’s midsection tightened, and he clung to Kurt. It was adorable and warm and oddly sensual given his clothing-deficiency, but now was definitely not the time for thoughts like those. Kurt took a deep breath and tried to pry Blaine’s fingers out from under him, wriggling away.

“Mmm,” Blaine moaned. Now that Kurt was more to the side of him, he could see the curve of Blaine’s cheek and the thickness of his brows and the way his eyes scrunched in his sleep. He’d seen Blaine sleeping before of course, on several occasions (and not just the evening of the Rachel Berry House Party Train Wreck Extravaganza), but he’d never been so wrapped up around him before. He didn’t look young or innocent, like most people said about the sleeping, he looked kind of like one of Kurt’s more shameful dreams.

Kurt’s heart thumped against his rib cage. If he even missed one dose, his whole body— _Blaine’s_ body—could be compromised. He nudged Blaine again, grabbing the pillow under him preemptively to wrap Blaine around it if it came to that. Blaine frowned, pouting in his sleep, and his hands flexed against Kurt’s chest, reaching out for him. Kurt stared at him, wide-eyed, hoping his sweat didn’t drip onto Blaine and wake him up. He tries to scoot away and the mattress springs whined underneath him. Blaine snuffled in his sleep and tried to grab for Kurt again, but Kurt clasped his hand, curling it around the pillow. Kurt slowly, ever so slowly, pulled away. Blaine groaned again and rubbed his cheek against the pillow.

Kurt gingerly stepped off the bed, trying to quiet the padding of his bare feet across the floor. He told himself it was a choreographic move, to slip so quietly across the hardwood, but then he was hit with a horrific wave of dizziness and he almost collapsed as his head erupted in white-hot-blinding pain. He clutched his temples as he stumbled to the hallway and gracelessly crumbled outside the bedroom door. He gasped raggedly, fingers knotting his hair as his skull seemed to burst open. He pressed his forehead against the cold wood—colder against his clammy forehead—as he flattened his hands against his ears to block out everything but the pulsing of his blood.

_I so hope Blaine doesn’t wake up right now._

After an eon or so, Kurt was able to rouse himself and sway on his feet. It was a side effect of the PEP, amplified by missing a dose. He’d heard it could happen, but he didn’t know how bad it was. He felt along the wall as he made it to the staircase and down the stairs. He grabbed his shoes from beside the door and his jacket from the coatrack. He only had so much time to get back before Blaine woke up and started asking questions he couldn’t answer.

* * *

Kurt parked out on the street, easily pulling up beside the Hudmel mailbox. It was barely seven and the sun hadn’t even risen yet (because it was late October), but the sky was lightening. He tightened his jacket around himself and made his way up the walkway. The door wasn’t locked because Finn was more beautiful than brainy. Kurt just sighed as he walked in.

Kurt stepped into the foyer and slipped off his shoes to avoid making noise, even though he knew well-enough that Finn was dead to the world before lunch. It was best that their romantic relationship never took off because Kurt just couldn’t deal with that level of—Finn is sleeping in the middle of the living room floor underneath a hot pink cardigan.

Kurt blinked at the sight. He whirled around and stared out the window before trying that again. He turned back and _yep,_ Finn Hudson is naked on the floor under that monstrosity, and even if Finn decided to engage in an intriguing adventure in cross-dressing, he’d never go for something so garish and small. That horrible fact meant somewhere _in his house_ was a naked Rachel Berry who had debauched his little brother on his _floor_ that he had _just_ waxed last weekend. What was even the point of changing Finn’s sheets every week if he was going to just defile the floor with vaginal fluids and seminal fluids and—ugh! He shuddered.

He gritted his teeth and slowly breathed out, counting out seven seconds, before breathing in again. He heard Rachel pitter patter across his defiled floor, biting the tip of his tongue as she stepped into sight.

She squeaked and hid behind his kitchen wall.

“Rachel Berry,” he hissed, stalking towards her. “You will clean up my living room, put my brother to bed, get dressed, and help me gouge my eyes out because so help me I can never unsee what I have just seen.”

“Finn said you were spending the night at Blaine’s!” she hissed back, peaking out behind the wall, an arm crossed defensively over her chest and another disappearing behind the door frame, probably to belatedly cover the-horrible-thing-that-shall-not-be-named.

“I am,” Kurt said. He tried to bleach out the images of Rachel’s chest, and Finn’s—He tried to quash that image before it could stir up any old _thoughts_ that had once so innocently involved public handholding and maybe some light kissing—with Blaine’s fuzzy hair and stupid smile. He closed his eyes and felt another headache coming on. Thankfully this wasn’t another head-splitting, blinding one from the meds, just the frustrating nonsensical rage he always contracted from the viral infection that was one Ms. Berry. “Now I’m going to go upstairs to get clothes and toiletries for the weekend, and we are never to speak of this horrible moment again after you scrub my floors!”

* * *

Rachel watched Kurt hurry up the stairs, and made her way to the living room as fast as she could with her arms cupped around her body. She grabbed her bra from under Finn’s shirt in front of the ashy fireplace, and snapped it back on, and then slipped back into her dress from last night. She poked Finn’s shoulder, and he groaned.

“Finn,” she whispered, “Finn, you have to get up.”

“Mmm,” he groaned, “Not right now.”

“Finn!”

He tried to swipe at her with a lazy, heavy-handed motion and almost knocked her over if she didn’t have impeccable balance from a few months of ballet she had when she was four.

“Finn, don’t you want to move to your bed? Isn’t it comfier?”

“No,” he mumbled, “This s’fine.”

“Kurt said we have to move or he’s going to cut up all of your pin-ups,” Rachel pleaded.

“S’fine,” Finn insisted, grabbed her around the waist and pulling her against his chest, “I’ll jus’ cut up his mag’zines. Go back to sleep.”

“No, Finn!” Rachel said, trying to pull away. She heard Kurt walking around upstairs and struggled away from Finn’s arms. She pursed her lips and grabbed the comforter from the floor, covering her boyfriend with it. Then she found her bag and headband. She pulled out her mascara and the crumpled pamphlet from backstage. She bit her lips and looked up the stairs. Kurt was still up there for now.

She hissed over her shoulder, “Finn, I’ll make you flourless banana pancakes if you decide to go to your bed.”

“…With ‘xtra bananas?”

“Yeah!” She forced a grin and helped him hobble up to his feet. She wrapped the comforter around him and pushed him towards the staircase. His eyes were still half-closed and he swayed on his feet, but he made his way up.

She just had to wait for Kurt to come down, and then she could corner him about that pamphlet she found. Just had to wait.

She pursed her lips again, and fixed her hair in the dining room mirror, and fiddled with her bra straps, and fixed her mascara, and did twenty squats because lounging around with Finn (beautiful, loyal, lovely Finn who she wouldn’t trade for anything less than a Grammy _and_ a Tony) put her off her daily hour-long exercise routine, and headed to the kitchen to get the eggs and vanilla and coconut oil and bananas and flax seed for the pancakes, and went through four affirmations, and beat the eggs and banana and seed and vanilla, and finger-combed her hair again, and poured the oil, and heated up the stove, and boiled the oil, and made eight pancakes, and _was about two minutes from marching up the stairs_ herself _to confront Kurt about this clear and proper misunderstanding_.

Rachel had never been a patient person.

It was a misunderstanding. It had to be, because stuff like this just didn’t happen. Not to good people. Not in real life.

Finally— _finally!_ —Kurt lumbered down the stairs with a bag and in a change of clothes and was almost already out the door, when Rachel intercepted him. Curse his long legs and brisk get-out-of-the-way strut!

“Kurt, hey!” she said, giving a show smile. _Rachel Berry, you are a star_. “Can I talk to you?”

“Not right now, Rachel, though I am honestly glad to see that pastel monstrosity again. Blaine’s still asleep, and—”

“No!” she squeaked, putting herself directly in front of the door. He tried to step around her and she stepped in the way, hands on the doorknob and lock behind her.

He raised a brow.

Her eyes were wide, and her cheeks hurt from the forced smile. She had to stall him, but how? Her eyes trailed over the room, zipping and zapping this way and that, and stalled on his finger.

"How's your finger?" Rachel murmured. She bit her lip and forced herself to meet his eyes again. _You can do this, Rachel Berry. You're a star._

Kurt gave her his usual annoyed and bemused glare. "Fine."

"Are you sure?"

He squinted at her, maybe trying to find a reason she asked, and then nodded.  "Yes. I do own it after all."

He went to move around her but she planted herself in front of him again.

"Rachel, I have to—"

"Are you okay?"

"Yes!" he said in exasperation. "Blaine is still asleep, I need to get back before he wakes up."

"No!" she said, eyes dropping and hands falling to her sides from the doorknob. Then it all came spilling out. "I found the pamphlet."

Kurt blinked down at her. "What pamphlet?" Something about his voice—was it stiff? she wondered, scared? Too controlled. Too forced. Kurt wasn't as good an actor as she was, so maybe….

"I found it under the sewing machine?" she tried.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Stiff. Scared?

"I think you do," Rachel said and then she rolled to the balls of her feet, centering herself. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as the words sputtered out, quiet, under her breath, "I know you were raped."

Kurt took a sharp breath, too dignified to be a gasp. She always thought that was Kurt's worst trait—he was too focused on appearance to really emote properly, to really project and telegraph his feelings to the audience. Except maybe when he sang.

“You are out of your mind, Rachel Berry,” Kurt bit out, face carefully blank.

“I found this pamphlet,” she repeated, almost breathless, staring up the seven inches separating their eyes. She swallowed, eyes flicking over to the stairs to check for Finn’s lumbering feet and then back to Kurt’s pale face. Was it always that pale? She honestly didn’t know. A lot of people were pale compared to her dads and herself. “And I think it’s yours.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I really don’t think I am,” she said. She tightened her lips, rolling the bottom one between her teeth. “You’ve been, I don’t know, different this week. Quiet.”

“You and I both know you don’t hear anyone over your giant voice, and I love that about you, I really do. But you’re insane, and I’m leaving, because I’m not your sidekick here to listen to your speculations and internalized melodramatics because my life is not part of the as-of-yet Untitled Rachel Berry Project. I’m not gonna be a mysterious subplot to your lifetime movie drama.”

“But there is something mysterious,” she said, eyes wide, burning. Funny. Her mascara had never irritated her eyes before. She swallowed again. God, she was so thirsty right now. “There is something going on.”

Kurt rolled his eyes and cocked his head. “Rachel. I haven't talked much to Ms. Pilsbury since the audition. How could I have one of her pamphlets?"

“It has your blood on it. From when the sewing needle went through your nail?” She grabbed his hand, and they both looked down at the fresh Band-Aid. She looked up at him under her lashes. “You were the only one near the sewing machine that day.”

Kurt jerked his hand away. “I am leaving.”

“Kurt, please.”

“Don’t touch it,” he cautioned.

"The pamphlet?” she asked, mouth dropped open, “I already read it. And Kurt, it really seems like—"

"Don't touch the blood," Kurt clarified, eyes on the ground.

"What? Why?"

He looked up at the ceiling and finally said, "HIV travels through the blood. I'm still taking PEP, but it might not…."

"HI—Kurt?!" She stiffened.

"Rachel," he said, grabbing her by the upper arms, "I love you but I'm leaving. Burn the pamphlet. Forget you saw it. As far as I'm concerned, nothing happened."

"But—"

He whipped around, like a tornado.

“I said drop it!” he said, like a warning.

“Or what?” she said, helpless. She crossed her arms, her hands clutching at her own ribs, a facsimile of an embrace. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

“ _Drop it_!” he yelled in her face.

Despite herself she flinched away.

He froze.

They stared at each other, Kurt’s face red and glasz eyes curiously open, both of their breaths heaving between them.

“Nothing happened.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Rachel.”

“Have you gone to the hospital? Have you reported it? You gotta report it, Kurt—”

“Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do,” he hissed in her face, bowing down to look at her. “Nothing happened. Now get out of my way and clean my living room. I will see you Monday morning, and we will talk about NYADA, and how well you did as Maria, and how great it was to spend the night with my brother, and how the campaign is going for me and for my father. Do you understand me?”

His voice was flat, firm. He’d make a great villain, Rachel thought idly.

She stepped out of the way.

He left.

After a few seconds, she heard his car rumble awake and drive away.

Then she heard Finn lumber down, and she pasted on a smile, and she folded back up the pamphlet before putting it back in her bag.

* * *

Blaine couldn't get it out of his head. The way Kurt's mouth… his glorious, wonderful, beautiful mouth… God, it was wonderful how Kurt just tongued him and licked and sucked. He'd had Kurt's mouth on him before, of course, on his shoulders and back and neck and mouth and wrists, and he knew how wonderful Kurt's lips, teeth, hands, body felt everywhere. And with the amount of singing they did, their gag reflexes were practically nonexistent, and he frankly could not wait to try his numbed gag reflex out on Kurt. He’d wanted to do it last night, but Kurt was so focused on him, with his long white fingers, his palms, his tongue, his lips…. He was so intense. Kurt’s intensity in all things was always overwhelming, all-encompassing and it was like being caught in the waves: exhilarating, surreal, spiritual and dangerous in all the right ways.

Blaine could not get over how perfect Kurt was last night (always, forever); how Kurt dragged off his clothes, how sensual it felt for the silky fabric—Kurt bought it for him, these days Kurt bought all his clothes, and he loved it—to drag against his chest, his nipples, his hipbones, his thighs; how Kurt smiled at him, hovered over him, smelled; how Kurt kissed him everywhere, nipped everywhere, licked everywhere.

He had felt like he was being devoured, just a sweet treat for Kurt to enjoy as Kurt licked at him, nipped at him, sucked at him. He loved how when Kurt tongued him for the first time and he jerked up against his will, Kurt forced him back down, biceps flexed against his sternum to keep him still; how when he'd lost himself completely—just floating away in bliss, surrounded, contained by Kurt—he felt like water feeling the edges of its glass: so wonderfully contained, most together when Kurt was holding him there; how he'd tried to grab Kurt's hair and Kurt instead slid his fingers through Blaine's and gently pinned his hands down on the sheets; how Kurt's thumbs traced his inner veins and pressed him down; how he was completely pinned and spread out underneath him, almost helpless.

It was like being taken to the mat in a boxing match— a complete rush as one body forced the other down, buried under the hot, musky weight of a man.

It might honestly be the gayest he's ever felt.

He rolled onto his back, blinking at the ceiling and smiling like a complete doofus. He was planning on maybe waking Kurt up with a blowjob, to return the favor from last night. It was honestly one of his most frequent fantasies—to be woken up with a mouth on him and to wake up Kurt with one—and he was giddy with the sudden freedom to touch Kurt as much as he’s ever wanted to. They had a whole weekend to themselves, and he was planning to keep Kurt under the sheets as much as possible, or in the shower, or maybe on the couch, or maybe bent over the dining room table like in three ~~hundred~~ of the clips he’d watched on Tumblr porn blogs. Then again, Kurt might want to clean the table afterwards…mmm, Kurt in a maid outfit.

He stretched his fingers across the bed, feeling along the sheets for Kurt’s warmth. The sheets were cold. He turned his head, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. Kurt wasn’t there. _Damn_. He hoisted himself up. He looked over at his alarm clock, and it was barely a quarter to eight. Kurt was probably in the bathroom, going through his morning face routine which had the unfortunate side effect of taking literally forever. He yawned and stretched. He rolled his head over his shoulders and took the chance to crack all the joints he could while Kurt was out and couldn’t scold him about it. His curls fell back into his eyes, and he fisted them, dragging his fingers across his skull. He really needed a haircut, but Kurt liked his hair the way it was, and he liked Kurt liking how he was. Maybe he could try and “convince” Kurt… on his knees? He grinned to himself, flopping back on the rumpled sheets, hands on the back of his neck.

After a few minutes of dozing, he lazed his way out of bed. He pulled at his hair again, pinning it down on the top of his crown, and made his way down the hallway. “Kurt,” he called, grinning, “Kuuurt.”

He tilted his head and started tapping out a beat on the walls, humming out the tune, and began to sing, “[When I wake up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEeaS6fuUoA&ab_channel=BillWithersVEVO) in the morning, love, and the sunlight hurts my eyes….” He tapped the wall with his knuckles and gyrated, sliding and gliding down the hall for a couple of measures like he was Michael Jackson, “And something without warning, love, bears heavy on my mi-i-ind!” He climbed the arpeggio, rocking his head to the beat he was making.

He tripped over his toes and caught the edge of the banister and swung into a spin, catching himself before he could fall. _I already fell, baby! I fell for you!_ He laughed at himself and carried on, not even missing a beat, “Then I look at you, and the world's alright with me!”

He bit his lip and slid towards the bathroom, prepping for Kurt to join in on the harmony and the chorus. “Just one look at you, and I know it's gonna be a lovely da—Kurt?” He paused. He peered around the dark, empty bathroom, and then behind the shower curtain. Kurt wasn’t there either.

He humphed and frowned (it definitely was not a pout), and backed up to the banister. He swung around and lumbered down the stairs. “Kurt?” he called. Was Kurt making breakfast? _Ooh_ , was Kurt making breakfast in bed for them to share? Did he mess up the surprise? He could pretend to go back to sleep….

He pasted on a smile and crept into the kitchen, but that was empty, too.

“Kurt?” he called again, looking around the kitchen, and then over the countertops overlooking the living room, and the den. Then he padded along the carpet to the foyer and then the grand foyer then the dining hall. Kurt wasn’t anywhere. The hairs on the back of his neck rose up and he stiffened.

He looked suspiciously over the windows and the door looking for—well, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Broken windows, maybe? Signs of a struggle? What even are signs of a struggle? In season four of _Supernatural_ (which he watched _for the plot, Kurt,_ not the epic “my siren is my brother” bromance or “Personal space, Cas” moments!), Kate Milligan scratched at the floor as she was dragged under the bed, actually clawed up the wood really bad. He peered at the wooden floors of the foyer, squinting worriedly. Should he call the police?

“You are being ridiculous,” he told himself with a nervous laugh, “Kurt was not kidnapped for ransom by Sue Sylvester’s campaign staff.” Probably. Most likely.

Wait a minute.

He face-palmed and wheeled around to the door. He peered outside the door, underneath the security door chain, and Kurt’s car was gone.

_Maybe the kidnappers dumped it in a ditch to fake a car-crash._ “Shut up,” he told himself firmly, “He went out for coffee. Or, or a change of clothes.” Kurt usually had a backup outfit in his car. Besides, Blaine had somehow ended up with some of Kurt’s clothes through completely legitimate means that absolutely did not include magically losing in the wash before Kurt prohibited Blaine from washing his clothes because most of it was dry-clean only anyway. Maybe Kurt had stopped carrying a backup outfit? That didn’t make sense. What if the weather suddenly changed? He’d need a different jacket and hat if it began to rain, and a different scarf if it snowed, so he usually had a weather appropriate color-coordinated set of clothes and accessories.

Maybe he should call Kurt? But then Kurt might answer the phone while he was driving and get distracted and crash and die. He frowned and went back upstairs to shower and gel his hair.

By the time he was done and padded back down the stairs in his pajama pants and A-shirt from yesterday. It was really too early for Kurt to be mad over him wearing yesterday’s clothes; he could play the “It’s-an-ungodly-hour-I’m-cute-and-sleepy-cuddle-me” card or “Well-maybe-rip-my-clothes-off-and-bend-me-over” card. Well. Last night, they hadn’t really done bend-me-over-sex. Kurt had sucked him off and then pulled him off seconds after, enjoying how the oversensitivity made Blaine wiggly and whiny and writhing and jerking and gasping at the pain-pleasure-overwhelming feeling. And he was staring up at Kurt through spasming eyelashes, watching Kurt stare at his jerking, kicking as he thumbed the oversensitive head and then as his pain gave way to aching pleasure. With the only lube being Kurt’s spit, the move of his hand was almost chafing, pulling at his skin in the most wonderful way, rolling flesh over the head. He liked how Kurt just stared at it, at him, in wonder, in hunger.

He hummed to himself, tapping his fingers on the countertop, “Touch-a-touch-a-touch me. I wanna be dirty. Thrill me, chill me, fulfill me….”

Oh. He flushed, ashamed, at the granite countertop.

Maybe Kurt was a little mad or disappointed about how last night was glaringly one-sided in retrospect. Kurt was obviously hoping their first-time would be more mutual. Who wouldn’t be mad about that? Blaine was a total tool, passing out on Kurt. Of course, Kurt was oh-so-polite-about-it last night. But when was Kurt ever polite? Kurt turned catty and bitchy into an art-form.

How could he make up how disappointing he was to Kurt? Maybe when Kurt came back (if he came back— _he’ll come back. Right? Right?!_ ) he could great him with a flower between his teeth on his bed scattered with rose petals. Oh wait. He didn’t have any flowers, and he didn’t dare go out to buy some in case he missed Kurt’s return.

He could make Kurt breakfast! How hard could it be to cook? He had the bad habit of living on junk food and take out when his parents were out of town. His mother tended to stay behind so it wasn’t usually a problem, and he used to just board at Dalton full-time. Kurt was just a day student—room and board being about $11,000 was kind of steep for a blue-collar family.

Some of the more snobbish, socially conservative boys at Dalton liked to make snide remarks about Blaine slumming it, and Kurt being a gold digger or angling to be a kept boy. Of course, they only dared to say that after Kurt transferred back to McKinley so they couldn’t be accused of bullying him. And it didn’t even make sense! Kurt couldn’t even _be_ his kept boy; Blaine wasn’t two or so decades older than him, so he couldn’t _be_ his Sugar Daddy. And Kurt wouldn’t want to be a kept boy anyway, and was obviously not a gold digger.

He tried to ignore the old memories from his school before Dalton where some of the braver and crueler boys offered him money to suck them off, because _of course_ Blaine would be happy to suck them all off as a gay man. He couldn’t imagine anyone offering Kurt that kind of dirty money without being overcome with rage and nausea. And he didn’t like being accused of being one of those dirty boys paying for a boy to suck him off because he liked the power play and the desperate mouth.

Oh God, what if Kurt felt that was how Blaine was treating him? Did he treat Kurt like he was just warm mouth to him, like Mickey said to Ian on _Shameless_? He couldn’t believe he’d treated anyone like that, let alone someone as perfect as Kurt. First his fuck-up in the Scandals parking lot and now this?

He was losing Kurt, he was sure of it. Kurt had been pulling away all week, and now—

He heard wheels roll up the gravel driveway. He froze.

Kurt slowly opened the door, because he was sweet and trying not to wake up Blaine because he was such a great boyfriend, and Blaine was such a fuck-up in comparison.

Kurt toed off his shoes and dropped his bag. He peeled off his thick scarf, hanging it on the coatrack with his peacoat and then pulling out a lighter scarf from the coat packet, wrapping it around his neck. Kurt must have gone out for his clothes and toiletries. Kurt was wearing a blue turtleneck and a pair of velvet trousers with a seam in the middle of his leg rather than on the sides. Blaine thought he’d seen a version of that in the 2011 Fall GQ. He watched Kurt tighten the silk patterned scarf almost like a tie as he crept up behind him.

He reached out a hand and Kurt jumped out of his skin, jerking backwards and twisting around as he slammed his back against the doorway, with his fists half-raised.

Blaine stared, mouth half-agape. “Kurt? Are you okay?”

Kurt laughed nervously and said, “You’re awake!”

“Yeah.” Blaine was still frowning at him. Blaine swallowed and looked over to the kitchen and then back at Kurt. “Are you sure?”

“Of course!” Kurt said, clearly forcing a smile. “I was hoping to be back before you woke up.”

“That’s okay,” Blaine murmured, eyes trailing over Kurt’s face, looking for… something. Kurt could be the greatest actor when he wanted to be. 

Blaine rested his palms on Kurt’s hips and pulled him inwards. Kurt kissed him, a hand raising to the back of Blaine’s neck Blaine deepened the kiss, pressing his tongue along Kurt’s bottom lip, and he felt Kurt smile before he tugged at the hair on the nape of his neck. Blaine smiled back and pulled away.

Blaine fluttered his eyelashes and said, “You wanna go back upstairs?” He teased a thumb at Kurt’s scarf.

Kurt’s eyes shuttered and his smile dissolved to nothing. He bit his tongue between his teeth and said, “Not right now.”

So he was mad, Blaine realized with a sinking feeling.

“I want to…,” Blaine said, and then he swallowed. _Courage_. He was no good with words, but maybe…. He breathed out deep, and dragged his thumb down the blue fabric—is that cashmere?—to tease at Kurt’s belt-buckle. He raised his brows meaningfully. “…Can I return the favor?” He gave a crooked grin and felt at the brass metal.

Please say yes.

Kurt took a sharp breath and rolled his eyes over the countertop of the kitchen. _Is he rolling his eyes at me or just looking away in exasperation?_ Blaine wasn’t the type to sweat when nervous. He raised his eyebrows again.

Kurt shook his head and grimaced. “I’m really not feeling it.”

“Oh. Okay.” Blaine was not going to cry. He wasn’t that much of a girl.

Kurt rolled his head over his shoulders and said, “It’s not that. Not really. I’m just not—feeling well.” There was a hesitation there. What did it mean?

Was Kurt lying?

“Blaine,” Kurt insisted, “Look at me.” He caressed Blaine’s stubbled jaw (crap, he forgot to shave) and lifted his chin. “It’s not you. I love you.”

Was Kurt really gonna pull the “It’s not you, it’s me” line? Really?

Blaine blinked furiously. “I just feel bad. I, I left you hanging. I could—please?”

“Not right now. Later. I—I promise,” Kurt said, fixing his jaw with determination.

“You don’t have to force yourself.” Blaine shook his head. His voice arched high, “What do you want for breakfast?”

“Blaine.”

Blaine swallowed heavily. He turned to the kitchen.

“Blaine!”

Blaine pursed his lips and steeled himself. “I’m sorry,” he offered, “I’ll do better.”

“It’s not you! I just—ugh!” Kurt made a frustrated gesture and grabbed Blaine’s arm, turning him around so they were eye to eye again. “I just—I—I just want it to be good for you.”

“Why wouldn’t it be good for me?” Blaine squinted up at him, and then…, “It wasn’t good for you?”

“No!” Kurt said, “It was so good, but I just… Blaine. I’m tired. Can we talk about this later?”

Blaine licked his lips and nodded.

* * *

When Rachel finally got home, she practiced her scales and cleaned her room and ironed her clothes. She put away her clothes and brushed her hair and worked out. She took a shower and blow dried her hair and practiced dance routines for _West Side Story_ and Glee. She sang her way through “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” and “One Hand, One Heart.” She straightened up her Goal Board and wrote her To-Do list and did her homework.

Through all this, she absolutely, positively did not think about the pamphlet burning a hole in her bag.

When she ran out of things to do, she sat at her desk and powered up her computer. She closed her eyes as she clicked on her internet browser. She went to Google. She typed in “rape.”

The first link was of the Wikipedia page, and then there was the reports on Google News of a bunch of rapes and the arrests of rapists, and then the dictionary definition of rape. She read through the Wikipedia page.

“‘Most people respond passively to the rape,’” she read, swallowing hard. She shook her head and said aloud, “Why? Why wouldn’t you fight?” She skimmed the rest of it from there. The whole page generally dealt with male on female rape. Was it the same for boys? The page said guys generally had the same responses to rape, but it was a cold page. Mechanical. Meant to inform and nothing more.

She closed the page and opened a new one.

She searched for hours, reading and reading and reading. She read list after list after list of things to never say to a rape survivor: never suggest it was their fault; that if you were in their shoes that you’d’ve done something different; that they could have fought harder, screamed louder, said something sooner; that their rapist didn’t know what they were doing; that they don’t remember it right; that they misunderstood what happened; that it wouldn’t’ve happened if they weren’t provocative/underdressed/relaxed/drunk/high/alone; that they deserved it; that it didn’t happen.

She read up on consent, abuse, female-on-female, female-on-male, and male-on-male rape. She read up on statistics and laws and so many forums.

And then she started seeing posts about people denying rape happens, denying that someone can be coerced into “consenting,” denying that men can be raped, denying that women can be rapists. She started to feel sick. She stood up, calmly walked across the room, and retched over her trash can, but nothing came up.

Then she walked back to her computer and shut it off.

A few hours passed. She dozed and meditated and contemplated different songs for NYADA because they had to let her audition (obviously a formality, because unlike Lima or Dayton or Columbus community theater,  _NYADA_ could identify talent when she was looking them in the face). 

She was laying on her bed, eyes on the popcorn ceiling, when her phone vibrated across the table. She didn’t want to move, but she did anyway because it might be a call from a recruiting agency for her talent, or from a community theater production desperate for a smidge of true-born talent, or from one of her friends in Glee congratulating her about West Side Story or asking for her advice about a song.

She picked it up with a show smile, not even looking at the caller, and said, “This is Rachel Berry speaking!”

“Hi, Rachel.”

“Blaine.” Her smile disappeared and she spun away from her desk, facing her reflection over her dresser. She bit her lip and her fingers brushed against her cheek. “How are you?”

“It’s Kurt.”

Rachel paled, eyes wide in her reflection. Did Kurt tell Blaine?

“I think I messed up,” Blaine continued, voice soft, as if he was having this conversation with her in secret. Kurt was probably still there. Obviously. What could Blaine have done? Did Kurt tell him and Blaine react like one of those horrible people on the internet?

“Wha-What happened?” she forced out. She twisted one of her camisole straps, pulling it taut against her shoulder, centering herself.

“Last night, Kurt and I…ya know…we—”

She tittered, eyes wide and frantic. “You guys had sex?” That seemed too soon to her, much too soon. If she had been raped—though she knew that would _never_ happen to her—she didn’t think she’d be able to just jump right into bed afterwards. And what about HIV? Kurt had said he was worried about that—wait. Did they…? “Did you use protection?”

“Rachel!” Blaine said, aghast, “That’s really not—”

“Did you? Safe sex is very important even if an unplanned pregnancy is obviously not an option for you—”

“No! Rachel, that’s not a big deal. I just—last night, I was the only one who, ya know, orgasmed.” She thought her cheeks were so hot that they would melt the phone, hearing something like that. She thought she could almost smell the plastic burning through the other end of the line, too, because Blaine must be flustered as she was. “And I think that Kurt’s mad at me about it, and I want to fix it, but he won’t let me—”

“Blaine,” she cut him off, face beet red. “I get the picture.” What even was she supposed to say? She never really wanted to think about her ex-boyfriend’s and best friend’s sex life. And she couldn’t just ask Blaine if Kurt had told him about what happened, because what if he hadn’t told Blaine? All the blogs were very firm about the victim disclosing if and only if she wanted to, and it had to apply the same to Kurt. Besides she read that being raped tended to mess up sex for the victim…. But was it the same for guys? Was it an example of rape culture that there wasn’t as much information about what it was like for guys? She didn’t really get the whole concept of rape cult—

“Rachel? Are you there?”

“Yeah!” She bit her lip, and confessed, “I just am trying to figure out what to say.”

He huffed.

“Why do you think he’s mad at you about it?”

“Because.” He paused and then rushed out in one breath, “Because he left this morning and he doesn’t want to have sex now and he said he wants it to be good for me, but does that mean it wasn’t good for him? I mean—”

“Maybe,” she interrupted, “Maybe he just doesn’t want to _you know_ right now.”

“…Did he talk to you this morning?” Blaine finally asked, voice different somehow.

“What?”

His voice was suspicious, she realized. He was suspicious of her. “Did he talk to you about what happened last night?”

“What happened last night?” Flashback? She read that that could happen to a rape victim during sex.  

He ignored her. “Did he talk to you about not liking it, not liking me?”

“Of course not! You _know_ Kurt loves you.”

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He was right. She sounded defensive, she wasn't delivering the act she was supposed to. She needed to protect Kurt here, but how?

"Blaine, it doesn't mean anything—"

"Kurt said it sucked, didn't he?"

"No! Absolutely not! Blaine, listen to me. Kurt didn't talk to me about that at all!"

"What _did_ he talk about?!"

She muffled a groan and said instead, "Kurt loves you, and he was just, probably just," afraid, traumatized, catatonic, "awkward. It was his, you know, first time, too." Right? It was his first _consensual_ time and that's was counted, said the websites. She didn't believe that, not really, but..., "He's probably just.... Kurt's weird, he acts different from everyone, you know tha—."

“You know what, Rachel, I’m going to hang up now.”

"No. Blaine. Listen to me! Kurt's not hiding anything! He didn't tell me anything! I promise you, Kurt loves you. With all his heart. At least as much as I love Finn, and you have to trust that Kurt loves you and that he's—"

"You're repeating yourself," he spat.

“Blaine—”

_Click_.

* * *

That evening, Blaine leaned against Kurt’s chest, embraced from all sides, head lolled a bit over one of Kurt’s shoulders. They were watching a sad romantic movie that did not reflect their relationship at all, but Blaine was still projecting onto it. The couple wasn’t talking and were having a misunderstanding that they weren’t talking about, and it was tearing them apart, and Blaine just couldn’t stand it. He wanted that onscreen couple to just solve their problems with each other and skip to the make up sex, or at least seek couple's counseling.

When his frustration reserves were worn down enough, he grabbed the remote to turn off the TV and maybe pick a fight that’ll end in angry sex or punches like on _Shameless_ (which he watched _for the plot, Kurt_ , not to ogle Ian’s abs or Lip's eyes) or both.

“It’s not you,” Kurt whispered in his ear before he could turn off the movie or pause it. “I’m going through some things, and I just don’t want to—”

“To fuck me?” Blaine asked, jerking away from Kurt’s arms, standing up, turning off the TV and tossing the remote on the coffee table with a rumbling clatter.

“To put my baggage on you,” Kurt clarified, face stern.

“What baggage?” Blaine asked, exasperated. “We’ve been together for over seven months now. We’ve been friends even longer. The most important part of being your boyfriend is being your friend, Kurt. You’re the one who told me that.”

“I just—” Kurt sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me!”

“I’m not rolling my eyes at you!”

“Are you not sexually attracted to me?” Blaine asked, eyes wide and wild.

“That is ridiculous, Blaine! I’ve been in love with you since the day I met you!”

“But you won’t have sex with me!”

“What do you call Friday night?!” Kurt asked, voice high and indignant.

Blaine groaned and dragged a hand along the slick of his hair, pulling at some loose curls at the nape of his neck. “I don’t know!” he finally said, too loud, too low, too aggressive. “I mean….”

“I’m sorry,” Kurt said, voice soft, broken.

Blaine spun around, to see Kurt’s eyes had gone glassy.

“No, baby,” Blaine said, anger and agitation twisting and knotting underneath the concern and love cultivated into him, and the honest frustration of hurting the man you love because that’s all you’re able to do sometimes even when you don’t _want_ to want to, “No, it’s not. It’s not your fault, it’s, it’s me. I’m sorry.”

“No. No, you’re right. You want this to be a fair thing—” Kurt shook his head and sat back down on the couch.

“It’s supposed to be a fair thing!” Blaine said, following him down, “It’s a relationship. It’s supposed to be equal.”

“It is,” Kurt said, nodding. It felt like a lie. Blaine hated feeling like Kurt was lying to him, even when he clearly wasn’t. It was a statement of fact but it sounded false, put-upon, acted.

“I want to give you…what you gave me. What you give me.” Blaine grabbed Kurt’s hands, drew them to his lap.

“You make me so happy,” Kurt said, eyes wide, earnest, holding something back.

“And I want to make you happy.” He felt desperate. “Please let me make you happy.”

Kurt leaned his head back to look at the ceiling. “Okay.” He sounded like he was a man sentenced to death. 

“Okay?” Blaine asked. He tried not to seem helpless, desperate, hopeful but fearful that Kurt would take this way.

“Okay.”

Blaine dragged Kurt into a kiss, and deepened it quickly, before Kurt could refuse him. Kurt moaned lightly, vibrations rolling between their lips, under their tongues, and he dragged Blaine towards him, so that Blaine straddled his hips. Blaine smiled against his lips as Kurt moved his hands up to hold his jaw in place, fingers clasped around the back of his neck, tangled in loose curls, and thumbs moving soothingly on his lower cheeks. Blaine drew his hands down from Kurt’s shoulders to his shirt buttons, fumbling to undo them all by feel alone. Kurt’s torso spasmed under his hands, and Kurt pulled his face away, eyes wide, shoulders stiff. _Too tense,_ Blaine thought, and he kissed his way from Kurt’s jaw down his neck, loosening his scarf and tossing it over the arm of the sofa. Blaine finally undid all of Kurt’s buttons and pushed the shirt down Kurt’s shoulders. Kurt arched his head backwards, pale neck long and slender, and Blaine was happy to worship it with his lips and teeth and tongue.

_Please let me touch you. Please let me show you how much I love you. Please touch me._

Blaine pulled away, gasping, hot breath hanging between them. Kurt blinked up at him, licked his lips. Blaine smiled and went to kiss just behind Kurt’s ear, partially because he wanted Kurt to feel them completely against each other from their necks to their thighs, to have their separate bodies to come as close to each other as possible at the moment. He lavished his tongue under the lobe of Kurt’s ear, enjoying Kurt’s gasp, when he saw it.

_What’s that?_

He pulled away.

“What’s wrong?” Kurt asked, seeing his face.

“What happened?” He brought a thumb up to the yellow bruise just behind Kurt’s earlobe.

“What?” Kurt shook his head in confusion.

“You have this bruise here?” It wasn’t supposed to come out as a question. He rubbed a gentle thumb along the yellow line and tried to peer behind where Kurt’s head met the sofa to see how far the bruise went. He couldn’t figure out what could cause such a peculiar looking bruise.

“What?!” Kurt exclaimed. He brought a hand up to the bruise that disappeared behind his neck. He huffed and looked away.

“How’d that happen?” He knew Kurt had an anemic sort of paleness and bruised just as easily (he really should talk to Kurt about iron vitamins), but he’d never seen a bruise that was practically a straight line.

“I-I don’t know?” Kurt said, blinking fast.

It sounded like a question. Like he was trying to figure out what to tell Blaine so he’d leave it alone. Blaine frowned and rubbed at one of his eyebrows. He cocked his head and asked, “Are you sure?”

Kurt huffed and said firmer than before, “No idea. One of those mystery bruises, you know?”

Blaine, still straddling Kurt, keeping him still, pulled at Kurt’s unbuttoned shirt and tried to see under the undershirt he was wearing. Kurt flushed and looked away, “It’s fine, Blaine. I probably just banged it wrong when I fell during Booty Camp or something. I’m kind of graceless sometimes. You know that.”

Blaine saddled back, so he was more on Kurt’s lower thighs near his knees than on his crotch. He said deadpan, “But it’s on your neck, not your shoulders.”

“I got bruises on my shoulders, too,” Kurt confessed, looking down at Blaine’s lap on top of his own. He wriggled and pulled off his undershirt and button-down. Blaine took a sharp breath, seeing yellow dusting across the tops of his shoulders and disappearing behind him, probably down his back. He put a gentle hand on the yellow bruises. It was more than one, he could see that, and some were a little darker than others, like they were layered.

“Did you fall on rocks?” They were kind of circular, but bruises tended to be.

“I honestly don’t remember,” Kurt said, with a nervous little laugh.

“You got one here, too!” Blaine exclaimed, seeing one just above Kurt’s belt.  He leaned back even more on Kurt’s thighs and hunched forwards to look at it.

“It’s fine, Blaine! It doesn’t even hurt.”

“You should really see a doctor about bruising this easy, you know?” Was Kurt refusing to have sex with him because he was hiding all these bruises? Is it leukemia that makes a bunch of mystery bruises show up without cause? Maybe Kurt has cancer and that’s why he’s been acting weird this week. Has he been hiding a diagnosis?

“I did,” Kurt said, “On Saturday. Last Saturday.” He laughed again, nervous. 

That’s weird. Doctor’s offices aren’t usually open on Saturdays.

“Is it something bad?”

Kurt shook his head. “It’s fine, Blaine. I promise it is. I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. I’m perfectly healthy, as far as the doctors can tell, but they’re still doing blood tests. In a month, we should know, okay?”

“Know what?”

“If I’m—healthy or not.” There was a hesitation there, like Kurt was trying to say something else but couldn’t. “Do you still want to…?” Kurt asked, teasing at Blaine’s belt buckle.

He was frowning still. Something was wrong with this picture but he couldn’t put his finger on what.

“Yeah,” Blaine finally said, “If you want to. I don’t want to pressure you.”

“No. No, I want this. I do.”

Kurt smiled a tight, close-mouthed smile and then licked his lips. “How do we want to do this?”

Blaine flushed and looked away. After a bit of prodding and teasing, he finally said, “I was thinking…mouths? My mouth on…on you, I mean?”

Kurt’s eyebrows practically disappeared into his hairline. He made a motion to say something, but his mouth just opened and closed.

“What’s wrong with that? Is that not okay?” Blaine, trying to hide how hurt he was, shifted on Kurt’s thighs. He should probably move; he was probably killing Kurt under his weight.

“I—just. I just, um—” Kurt sputtered, eyes moving here and there. Finally, soft voice pitched two octaves high: “Condoms?”

“Condoms?” Blaine repeated with a raised brow.

“Yeah.” Kurt nodded fast, face red, eyes low.

“But we didn’t use condoms—”

“Last night. I know.”

“So why in the world do you—?” His voice was harsher than he meant it to be, but Kurt was lying. He knew he was lying, or hiding something, or, or _something_.

Kurt scrunched his eyes shut and rushed out, “It’s the taste.”

“Taste?” Blaine blinked, then he huffed an embarrassed laugh. “I’m sure it’s fine.” One of the last things he was worried about was taste; in fact he was kind of looking forward to the taste, the smell, the humid, sweaty musk.

“I—no.” Kurt swallowed roughly and shook his head. “If you want… _mouths_ , we should use condoms.”

“Why—oh!” He realized suddenly why Kurt was bringing up condoms now. On Friday, they…Kurt went down on him and… It must have tasted bad or something. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Is there something I should do to—?”

“More pineapples, maybe?” Kurt said with a little titter and a jerky flourish with his hand. “But yeah. I’m self-conscious, and…yeah, condoms. I want it to be good for you.”

“It wasn’t good for you?” Blaine asked, unable to hide the hurt and honest repentance.

“No! No, it was great! I loved it…, but I think we should do condoms.”

“I don’t have condoms,” Blaine whined, “I don’t even think my parents own any.”

“That’s fine,” Kurt said, biting his lip. “I have some.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I got them…,” Kurt looked to his right and mumbled, clearly embarrassed, “from home. Well. From the doctor’s office. I got them from the doctor’s office for free and then I, uh, put them in a drawer at home. And then I…brought them just in case. I’ll, uh, go get one?”

“Okay,” Blaine said, face red and eyebrows drawn together.

He rolled to the side to let Kurt up, and Kurt grabbed his hand to pull him along with him. He loved it when Kurt did that. He smiled to himself, still contrite and embarrassed, but happy. This whole weekend he’d thought Kurt wasn’t attracted to him or was lying about something, but clearly this was just the two of them being awkward suddenly-non-virginal boys getting used to asking for what they need from each other, sexually. Just Kurt feeling awkward about wanting to use condoms. Yeah. Just… Rachel was right. Kurt wasn't hiding anything from him, it was just his first time. All first times are awkward, right?

He should really remember to pick up some pineapples from the store.

* * *

Later that night, Burt crept into the house, holding the door for his wife. She smiled at him, slow, sleepy. He lumbered up the stairs as quietly as he could, and she followed far more successfully. They crawled into bed and the mattress squealed under their weight. Carole flumped onto her stomach, burying her cheeks in the pillow crushed between her upper arms, and he toed off his boots before following her down.

He kissed the back of her neck and she mumbled at his tickling stubble.

Just after they crawled into bed, still fully dressed, he turned to her. “The school called me last Monday, about Kurt skipping his afternoon classes.”

“Have you been holding onto that all week?” she asked, blinking up at him from her pillow.

“Yeah,” he grumbled. “He’s been real weird since that fight he had with Blaine. You don’t think Blaine hurt him, do you?”

“I don’t think Blaine can hurt him more than any boyfriend could.”

“I dunno,” Burt muttered. “I was a shitty kid in high school, and I was shitty to all my girlfriends. Mean. Pushy. _Rude_.”

“Kurt’s not a girl, though, and Blaine probably doesn’t even know what the word ‘rude’ even means.”

“He’s certainly pushy though. And an idiot. And I don’t like him.”

She huffed a laugh and said, “Yeah, you do.” She rolled over and smiled at him in the dark, barely lit by the streetlamp peeking through the blinds. “Blaine’s a good kid, and Kurt’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“Yeah. But now Kurt’s sneaking out at night and skipping school and….”

“He’s a proper teenager, hon. He may be _different_ but he’s still just a teenaged boy.”

He frowned at her and ran a callused hand through her hair, carding it behind one of her ears. “He is. But something’s wrong. I can tell. I just can’t put a finger on what.”

* * *

In the hallway, just passed the staircase, Finn Hudson hovered outside their door, catching his parents' entire conversation.

* * *

And across the city, in Blaine Anderson's bedroom with one boy pressing down another, the CD player sang:

_"...I want you so bad_  
_Everyone has a secret_  
_Oh, but can they keep it?_  
_Oh, no they can't."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Research Notes:**  
>  I corrected some of Donna's interactions with Kurt and the police in the first chapter, thanks to _fuckedupisperfect_ who is a good person in the world. Accuracy is very important to me. 
> 
> PEP—post-exposure prophylaxis, which Kurt was given after his potential exposure to HIV—can cause malaise, fatigue, diarrhea, headaches, nausea and vomiting as side effects. In some places, you see the doctor regularly (weekly) after being prescribed PEP to track side effects and prescribed more each week. Where I am they do the full month all at once and otherwise don’t give a shit about you. I recently learnt it's different in different states. 
> 
> On the topic of Kurt having sex a week after his attack: every survivor is different, and every survivor reacts differently regarding sex. Some become hypersexual, some become sex-repulsed, some are unaffected in that respect, etc. Rachel's crass declaration that rape messed up sex for a survivor is not entirely inaccurate but it's also not really right or universal. 
> 
> **Reference Notes:**  
>  Blaine references _Supernatural_ and _Shameless_. In 2011 SPN had finished Season 6 and was starting Season 7, and the first season of _Shameless_ had just came out that January. _Shameless_ has several canon LGBTQ characters, including Ian Gallagher who is in an on/off sexual, dysfunctional (i.e. mutually abusive) relationship with Mickey Milkovich; season 7 is now on Netflix (US). To put it offensively, Gallavich is unprivileged, ghetto-Klaine. SPN, if you're not aware, is a horror/fantasy show about two brothers with loads of queer-baiting Ho Yay; season 13 is coming out this fall. 
> 
> **Characterization/PSA Notes:**  
>  What Blaine does in this chapter is actually not okay. He's pressuring Kurt into sex in a manner that makes consent dubious at best. While Kurt is theoretically willing to have sex with Blaine, he is being pressured into a kind of sex he does not want to do at the moment out of a sense of duty and guilt, to assuage Blaine's hurt feelings. Regardless of Kurt's history in this story, Blaine's behavior is not okay. Will that ever be addressed in story? No. Like in real life, unhealthy behaviors within relationships tend to go unpunished, and I would call canon Klaine an unhealthy relationship (this whole show was chock full of unhealthy relationships, don't even get me started on my soapbox. I love Klaine; they need(ed) couple's counseling with a real therapist). And Kurt not telling Blaine about possibly having an STI is also not considered okay, regardless of his history, but the world is far more grey than that.


End file.
